Firefox, Flickr, Fotos? Foul!

Or, I see dead people…

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with the idea of using Flickr as a better way to catalog and display my photos on the web. In the past, as far as the web was concerned, I really hadn’t done much more than upload images to my blog and then provide links to larger versions of those same photos. This was sufficient for most of what I wanted to do, but I was looking for something with a little more versatility. (Plus I’d also be able to use AJAX to display images here, which is really cool!) So I set up a Flickr account using my existing Yahoo! I.D. and started uploading pictures.

The first photo that I uploaded to Flickr was a huge disappointment. The image quality seemed flat, the colors dull, and seeing the picture on the web was just bad. So bad, in fact, that I deleted the image and looked at how I’d exported it because I thought I’d done something wrong or that the program I was using to upload the image was somehow screwing the picture up. So, I re-exported the image made sure it looked right on my Mac and then uploaded it again.

Still dreck!

Now, I use Firefox as my main web browser. I like Safari, but it doesn’t always play well with my WordPress weblog—buttons don’t always appear properly in the Write Post window—and it doesn’t seem to work as well with every web page that I view. But it appeared that Firefox was not handling photos in the fashion it should, making my photos look flat and ugly.

On the left in the photo above you’ll see an image viewed in Firefox, on the right is the same photo viewed with Safari. The Safari-viewed image looks exactly the same as I shot it. The colors are bright, the skintones are warm, the photo itself is just crisper. In other words Safari makes the photo look right.

There’s a fair amount of web talk about this issue—you can see some of that talk here and here—according to these discussions it seems that this is only related specifically to Firefox on the Mac, but in my testing it looks like Opera on the Mac and IE on Windows are a problem as well. Which leads me to believe that it’s more than just a browser problem, it’s either an images created on a Mac problem or Safari just works great with images and every other browser sucks. But I’m having a hard time believing that. It really appears that Flickr is having trouble with Mac-created images using browsers other than Safari as images uploaded to my site without any ties to Flickr look like their supposed to.
Anybody else out there had some experience with this? Is there any Mac magic that you’re performing to make your images look brilliant on Flickr. Otherwise my Flickr site is going to make it seem like you’re looking at dead people.