Flickr Photos Not Available – at least not yet

There is always a delay between publishing photos on Flickr and their being publicly available. In the past this delay varied arbitrarily between 1 and 15 minutes so it was not a problem.

However, from around December 26th Flickr users were reporting much longer delays of 24 hours, 48 hours and more.

This is a temporary problem with Flickr which is covered in the forums, specifically [Acknowledged issue] tags added recently are not picked up by searches?

You can check if you have the problem by:

• uploading a new photo to Flickr and tagging it
• viewing the tag page for the photo to check it is there
• logging out of Flickr
• refreshing the tag page
• If the photo either disappears or reveals a broken image link, then your photos will also definitely not be available to Slickr Flickr as they are not yet publicly available
• Next check the RSS feed (the orange icon) using Firefox for best display – if there are no photos then you need to wait a bit longer

With this problem our experience has been that the photo visibility increase gradually:

1. we have the broken links on our Flickr tag page;
2. then the links are good, but there are no photos in the RSS feed (the orange icon on your tag page);
3. then the RSS feed gets populated and you can fetch up to 20 photos with Slickr Flickr but fetches of more than 20 photos fail as this using the Flickr API;
4. and then finally it all works.

The longest delay we experienced was during the final step: we could use the RSS feed to fetch up to 20 photos within 30 minutes but it took 24 hours before the API returned any photos when we asked for more than 20.

Tip

If you are in the scenario where you can see the photos in the RSS feed (up to 20 of them) and but Slickr Flickr is still saying “No photos available” because it is using the Flickr API search then you can force Slickr Flickr to use RSS by specifying items="20" and use_key="n". The rationale here is that fetching 20 photos is better than none, The only hassle is having to revert back to the Flickr API when it is working again.

The latest updates from Flickr suggest they have mostly solved this problem however it is still affecting some users

7th Jan: Update from Flickr Staff

Currently, there are hardware and software issues affecting the search function in Flickr. Our operations team is aware of these problems and working on them. This will probably be an issue for few more weeks. We understand how important it is to make your work available in searches and it is important to us as well.

We’ve done some work to make this issue much better and most people shouldn’t still be seeing a lag in images showing in searches but it still may affect a few people. We are still working to get this fully resolved. For anyone that does see a lag the images should show up within a short period of time.

11th Jan: Update from Flickr Staff

We’ve done some work to make this issue much better and most people shouldn’t still be seeing a lag in images showing in searches but it still may affect a few people. We are still working to get this fully resolved. For anyone that does see a lag the images should show up within a short period of time.

19th Jan: Comment from Experienced User

The problem is still not resolved, and it also impacts the API.

Actually the issue is not just “tags added recently are not picked up by searches”, but rather “search returns unreliable results”.

When an internal error (e.g. timeout) in the flickr servers prevent the correct search results from being returned, flickr returns less results, or 0 result (with no error).

This makes it impossible to determine if the search result is correct, or if it is incorrect due to some failures of the flickr search servers.

Important Notice for New Flickr Users

New Flickr Accounts also may incur a delay in getting photos published publicly due to the Flickr account review process. New Flickr users should also look at the third question in this Flickr Help Topic about tags for more information.

Updated by Russell.