Update: I got a response from Flickr on a workaround. It’s nearly as strange as the initial problem:

Thanks for your reply and for the clarification. Before I get started, I’m really sorry that we didn’t completely resolve your issue the first time around. While the issue with downloading video has not yet been resolved, there is a work around that will allow you to do so in the interim. Currently you can view the old version on the video page if you select a different display language from the bottom of the screen. In this case I chose Español. Once you have done this and navigated to your video page you will be able to click on more actions button (three dots in the lower right hand corner) and select Descargar archivo original. This will download your original video file from there you can navigate to the bottom of the page and select English to restore the display language.

¡eso es muy extraño!

A couple of nights ago, I was furious.

I’d decided to stitch some of the videos of my daughter together into a brief movie. Since its early days, I’ve been a paying user of Flickr, and I’ve loved it. I used it not only as a store for all my photos and videos, but as a source of creative commons clip-art and a way of sharing content selectively.

Recently, I’d been even more impressed by Flickr’s huge volume of storage, offered freely to all. I continued to pay, finding the service useful.

So imagine my surprise when I tried to download one of my videos, in its original format, via Chrome.

I navigated to the video in question, clicked the little ellipsis menu on the right, and saw a link entitled “Download/All Sizes.” Clicking this, I got a confusing dialog with different sizes — but they were all pictures of the first frame of the file, not the video.

Wait, what? I needed the original video. I played around for an hour or so, trying to find the download button. It doesn’t exist. Then I went online and looked at the issue. I found an eleven-month-old support thread, in which a number of users mention this issue before someone from Flickr chimes in.

Fix 1: Downloading the version playing in your browser

The first is pretty simple. Simply replace the “www” in the URL with an “m” in your desktop browser. Then, when the page loads in that browser, play the video. Because of the way HTML-encoded video works, it will download instead.

Fix 2: Opening it in an iPad browser and mailing the link

A few hours later, I tried to access the video from an iPad using Chrome. When I clicked on the ellipsis, the menu had the option to download the file — but clicking it did nothing useful because an iPad doesn’t have an accessible file system. To be perfectly clear:

• When I visit Flickr from a desktop browser, I don’t get an option to download the original.
• When I visit Flickr from an iPad, I get the option, but can’t do anything about it.

Well, there is one thing I can do: mail myself that long URL and open it on a desktop browser. If there’s no one-time token in there, and it hasn’t expired, it should open up in a desktop where I can save it. And sure enough, it worked.

The real problem

Cloud computing is about trust. It’s about the expectation that the company entrusted with your information acts wisely and deliberately. And that it will never, ever, break the prime directive: Let me get to my stuff. To violate this expectation is to undermine every other bell and whistle the company might offer.

Let’s be clear. This isn’t just an oversight. Flickr is so awesomely, completely confused about a fundamental feature like recovering your own files that it gives a mobile user (iPad) and a desktop user (Chrome) different menus, each crippled in its own unique and precious way.

Cigarettes and ashtrays

There’s an apocryphal story about a smart investor — often, when it’s told, Warren Buffett — who, years ago, shorted an airline stock because there were cigarettes in the ashtrays on takeoff. If the airline is cutting back on cleaning the cabins, he reasoned, then other, far worse, things must be going on.

For a cloud provider, not being able to access one’s raw content isn’t just a bug, or a reason to switch providers. It’s the online equivalent of cigarettes in the ashtrays.