This is an interesting topic, particularly because I had not heard anything about it up to now, despite having many semi-pro and amateur photographer friends (I’m a wannabe). It appears that starting August 1st, Facebook will stop allowing desktop applications to upload photos to albums.
Since I have been uploading all of my Facebook albums through Lightroom, that’s quite a big deal for me. On Jeffrey Friedl’s website, there’s this note:
Warning: this plugin will likely cease to work as of August 1, 2018, because Facebook is revoking photo-upload privileges for all non-browser desktop apps like this.
As of June 2018, Adobe and I are in discussions with Facebook to see whether something might be worked out, but success is uncertain.
This is now less than a month before the deadline, and it appears there’s no update for this. Is it Facebook trying to convince people to just share all their photos as they were shot? Is it Adobe not paying attention trying to get people on their extremely-expensive Adobe CC Cloud products? (I have over 1TB of pictures shot, I can’t use their online service, it would cost me so much more in storage!) I don’t really know, but it clearly seems to be the case that my workflow is being deprecated.
Leaving aside the consideration of the impact of this on me alone, I would expect that most of the pro- and semi-pro-photographers would want to be able to upload their pictures without having to manually drag them with Facebook’s flaky interface. And it feels strange that Facebook wants to stop “owning” those photos altogether.
But there’s a bigger impact in my opinion, which should worry privacy-conscious users (as long as they don’t subscribe to the fantasy ideal of people giving up on sharing pictures): this moves erodes the strict access controls from picture publishing that defined social media up to now, for any of the users who have been relying on offline photo editing.
In my case, the vast majority of the pictures I take are actually landscapes, flowers, animals, or in general not private events. There’s the odd conference or con I bring my camera to (or should I say used to bring it to), or a birthday party or other celebration. Right now, I have been uploading all the non-people pictures as public (and copied to Flickr), and everything that involves people as friends-only (and only rarely uploaded to Flickr with “only me” access). Once the changes go into effect, I lose the ability to make simple access control decisions.
Indeed, if I was to upload the content to Flickr and use friends-only limited access, very few people would be able to see any of the pictures: Flickr has lost all of its pretension to be a social media platform once Yahoo stopped being relevant. And I doubt that the acquisition of SmugMug will change that part, as it would be just a matter of duplicating a social graph that Facebook already has. So I’m fairly sure a very common solution to that is going to be to make the photos public, and maybe the account not discoverable. After all who might be mining the Web for unlisted accounts of vulnerable people? (That’s sarcasm if it wasn’t clear.)
In my case it’s just going to be a matter of not bringing my camera to private events anymore. Not the end of the world, since I’m already not particularly good at portrait photography, and not my particular area of interest. But I do think that there’s going to be quite a bit of problems in the future.
And if you think this is not going to be a big deal at all, because most parties have pictures uploaded by people directly on their mobile phones… I disagree. Weddings, christenings, cons, sport matches, all these events usually have their share of professional photographers, and all these events need to have a way to share the output with not only the people who hired them, but also the friends of those, like the invitees at a wedding.
And I expect that for many professionals, it’s going to be a matter of finding a new service to upload the data to. Mark my words, as I expect we’ll find that there will be, in the future, leaks of wedding pictures used to dox notable people. And those will be due to insecure, or badly-secured, photo sharing websites, meant to replace Facebook after this change in terms.
