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gopalv 2 days ago [-]
Flickr was the coolest thing Yahoo had when I worked there (Brickhouse was a close second).
I really loved all the places where they snuck in "Game Never Ending" in the product, because they didn't set out to make a photo sharing product, but steered hard into that.
Flickr was the only property which was allowed their own version of PHP and despite having PHP inside, every single URL said ".gne" (Game Never Ending). I worked for the PHP team and that was my only excuse to show up to work in the SF office instead of being stuck in Sunnyvale when visiting the US.
They had all the right bits of architecture built out - rest of Yahoo had great code (like vespa or the graph behind Yahoo 360), but everything was more complex than it should be.
Flickr had the simplest possible approach that worked and they tried it before building anything more complex - the image urls, the resize queues, the way albums were stored, machine-tags, gps co-ordinates.
I also took a lot of photos to put up on flickr, trying to get featured on the explore page up front - it was like getting published in a magazine.
Every presentation I made had CC images backed by flickr, it was a true commons to share and take.
And then Instagram happened.
prox 2 days ago [-]
I have been going back some times to flickr and dropped insta, since it’s a crap place these days (like most of the big socials)
The elegance of flickr is just nice and browsing is fun.
+1 on Flickr being the best acquisition and product Yahoo! had.
I still have my account and old photos there. And because I licensed most of them as CC, a couple of them landed on Wikipedia because of that - felt nice.
nolroz 2 days ago [-]
I had everything set as CC until I noticed a photo of my very pregnant wife was getting many more views then anything else and I found it cited in a paper on training AI. That was somehow less endearing then someone getting a good use out of my images (which also happened at least once with one of my images)
disce-pati 2 days ago [-]
> a couple of them landed on Wikipedia because of that - felt nice.
as someone who goes down many rabbit holes on wikipedia, i appreciate this comment and all of those CC photos
ghaff 2 days ago [-]
When I was doing more graphics-rich presentations, the CC photo resource on Flickr was really useful. (In case someone asks, I usually wasn't being paid directly for giving presentations so I convinced myself I could feel comfortable using CC content in general even with strings like non-commercial attached.)
philipallstar 2 days ago [-]
I think the thing was that Instagram was snappy, and Flickr (to my strong recollection) was really slow.
Y-bar 2 days ago [-]
I also loved Flickr, and Pipes was a really cool technology too.
It’s cool that they used PHP, I always thought it was RoR platform.
I thought Flickr predated RoR, went to check Wikipedia: it says both were launched in 2004 but Flickr a few months earlier.
kwanbix 2 days ago [-]
I never understood the appeal of instagram over Flicker.
HoldOnAMinute 1 days ago [-]
It's dumbed down. In today's world, dumb always wins.
adamm255 1 days ago [-]
I was trying to think when I stopped browsing and using Flickr. You just reminded me.
adolph 1 days ago [-]
> Flickr was the coolest thing Yahoo had
From my point of view Yahoo destroyed Flickr. I was a happy user for many years and lost access to my photos due to authentication changes. At least Google had the decency to just shut down Reader as opposed to Yahoo's enshittification of a product that sparked joy.
sudonem 1 days ago [-]
Strong agree that Flickr went downhill rapidly when acquired by Yahoo - but also happy to report that it has since bounced back.
The community isn’t the same of course, but the platform itself is a joy to use again - especially as someone who got tired of Instagram when it stopped being about photography.
Brajeshwar 2 days ago [-]
This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme.
I was there pretty early. I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr that my Pro account upload quota was upgraded to 2GB monthly.
Made many friends via my photos, online and in-real-life. Many of my photos became pretty popular and picked (stolen a lot too) up by major newspapers/publications in India, USA, and even in Vietnam. Some even bought the original copy and rights. It was never my intention to sell my photos nor will that ever be but my guestimate is that I sold quite a lot (high single digit thousands of dollars).
I donated and gifted a lot of Pro accounts to people who asked, mostly students and thos who commented nicely on my blog. Many of my payments comes to Paypal and it got accumulated and there were no ways to get the money to India (for a very long time). So, I just used it to gift to others.
Before I stopped using it more than a decade ago. It had garnered over 10+ million views and my tenure with Flickr lasted almost a decade.
I signed up in 2004. It was part of a wave of hot new platforms, all of which it seems Yahoo! was acquiring (except YouTube, which went to Google). We used it at work as well (political consultancy) to host photos for applications, making great use of their excellent API. The idea of getting your photos back out again via a sane API with multiple sizes including thumbnails handled for you was pretty wild.
Brajeshwar 2 days ago [-]
Yes, API was the other best thing about Flickr. A friend made his fortune, especially during the exodus days of Flickr. He traveled around the world photographing some of the best pictures I have seen in my life. He retired pretty early in the Himalayas (he is originally from there).
He made Bulkr, which was one of those tools that just works and super easy to use, in getting all of your photos offline from Flickr. I don't think it works anymore. His revenue and hits went crazy after Veronica Belmont talked about it.
> This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme.
Elrond?
Brajeshwar 1 days ago [-]
Yes, correct. Elrond reminded Gandalf. I remembered Gandalf better.
limbicsystem 2 days ago [-]
Love those old photos of Macromedia - my wife worked in the same building at the time and they bring back a lot of nice memories :)
cycomanic 2 days ago [-]
No comment on your photos, but I think this abomination of a cookie selection banner is all on needs to see to decide on the current state of Flickr. It's literally several pages long!
adrithmetiqa 2 days ago [-]
This article got me curious as I used Flickr years ago. Sadly couldn’t even move past the cookie banner at all. Too bad
riffraff 2 days ago [-]
on the pro side, they do have a "reject all" which many do not.
karel-3d 2 days ago [-]
If you didn't pay recently, they deleted most of your photos anyway.
They deleted all but the newest 100 or so for the free accounts
mullingitover 2 days ago [-]
As a subscriber for something like two decades I respect them for being sober businesspeople and keeping the platform alive for paying customers, rather than dumping losses for growth hacks and then ending up a smoking crater.
thedonncha 2 days ago [-]
> If you didn't pay recently, they deleted most of your photos anyway.
>
> They deleted all but the newest 100 or so for the free accounts
The photos are still there. I don't have PRO and my 2772 images can still be seen, even by logged out visitors.
I can't upload anything though.
karel-3d 2 days ago [-]
Thats weird. They deleted almost all my pictures.
(I am not really mad at them btw.)
leviathant 2 days ago [-]
I still pay for Flickr Pro, for a couple of reasons: the API still works, and I basically use it as a DAM for my wife's website. She's a composer, and it's super handy to have her upload into a Flickr Album and pull back different image sizes for her catalog.
Secondly, it makes use of and exposes EXIF data. I really, really lament the Instagrammification of online photography, where the only aspect ration was 1:1, terrible resolution, no EXIF data, and certainly no easy way to link a photo to anything outside of Instagram. That EXIF data makes it so much easier to search photos - although it could do with some AI autotagging. Surely that's coming down the pike...
Lastly, it's like an internet time capsule. There are accounts that started in the early 2000s and haven't been touched since the 2010s, and you can still pull full resolution imagery from there. And there are people even more old fashioned (and probably even more old) than me, still uploading new photos and old slides.
It sucks that Yahoo didn't do anything with Instagram, but I'm glad it also managed to avoid completely destroying it.
sunaookami 1 days ago [-]
It's insane that a platform like Instagram that is focused on photo sharing compresses and downsizes photos so much.
alex1138 1 days ago [-]
Because Zuckerberg. It's not the original platform anymore. You have to keep that in mind at ALL times with anything he buys
lou1306 2 days ago [-]
EXIF data enabled some pretty cool things, like PhotoSynth [1]. This stuff looks futuristic even now, ~20 years later, basically what the Metaverse could/should have been.
Pretty sure we can fuse those photos together into a gaussian splat and roam around freely in 3D space now, rather than just have the rectangular photos pop up, but it's still very cool tech. I remember when that came out.
amatecha 2 days ago [-]
Yeah the time capsule thing is a big part of its value to me. I will never forget how disappointed I was when the "Macintosh" group disappeared. I think at some point I actually chatted with someone who worked at Flickr and explained that the group owner simply closed it at some point (can't remember 100%). It had so many photos going back to basically the earliest days of Flickr, of all kinds of awesome photos of Mac computers of all eras, not only new digital photos but tons of stuff people posted from prior decades. The other Mac/Apple-related groups were not as comprehensive. That was good while it lasted, at least. I wish there was some way to re-open the group :\
notlion 2 days ago [-]
I was a Flickr member for many years. It was the only photo sharing website that emphasized the art of photography and also felt like a real community where I actually made connections with and discovered like minded photographers. The focus was on the photography and it didn't play games to keep me locked into the platform (cough Instagram)
Nowadays, I have a locally hosted Immich instance. It's great as personal photo archive, but is missing the social features.
To be honest, with the advent of GenAI, I'm now reluctant to share my photos publicly because I don't like the feeling that my work will be slurped up for AI model training..
emkoemko 2 days ago [-]
same once i seen my images in the massive data sets, i quit posting my photographs online and just share between friends and family now
GaryBluto 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Renaud 2 days ago [-]
No they haven’t.
Copyright protected you against your work being used in ways you did not agree to.
Enforcement is another things but photographers and artists have had ways to push back against illicit use of their work, notably by larger corporations. Licensing is an industry based on this protection alone.
The difference is that now, large corporations with plenty of money are able to just swallow other people’s work and pretend it’s “fair use” and derivative enough that they wash their hand of the fact that their models, that they charge lots of money for, would not be able to output anything they were not trained on. At least you could argue that a large image model would have a hard time creating a picture of a cat if it hadn’t been fed pictures of cats that belonged to other people than the company producing the model.
I don’t know if training on the world’s data without compensation is fair or not. There are valid arguments both ways, but as an individual, it should still be your choice whether you want to allow your work to be used in ways you do not agree with.
I think people at large expect at least recognition, and if possible, compensation, for their creations.
When a consumption system is built around providing neither, I don’t think we should be surprised that people feel slighted.
komali2 2 days ago [-]
> Copyright protected you against your work being used in ways you did not agree to.
Is this true? Remember that Harlan Ellison plagiarism case, the nightmare he went through to get a payout? It seems the vast majority of times, when a corporation decides it wants to use something you created, it gets to just do so because it has more capital than you.
smallerize 1 days ago [-]
Yes. A side effect of the expansion of copyright enforcement pushed by larger corporations means that companies generally are walking on eggshells and have streamlined processes to remove content based on a standardized compliant process. Even more so in the last few years with the billion-dollar lawsuit against Cox working its way through the courts.
reaperducer 2 days ago [-]
Is this true?
Yes, it is.
I'm a previous career, I was a professional photographer. I spent a lot of time chasing after companies that operated with the "if it's in the internet, it must be free" mindset. The right letters, sent the right way, to the right people almost always gets things fixed.
In one example, a very major bank used one of my photos as the cover of a corporate report. That mistake paid my rent for a little over a year.
ghaff 2 days ago [-]
Most major corporations are not stupid enough to do that though, and if they do, their lawyers will tell them to just settle and the responsible person (or a scapegoat) will quietly move on. Far more likely it's some random blogger or low-rent publication grabbing stuff off the Internet.
reaperducer 2 days ago [-]
They still pay.
Like I said, the right message sent to the right person in the right way works 90% of the time.
This comes from actual experience, not just some rando second-guesser on the internet who thinks his suppositions are truth.
notlion 2 days ago [-]
> People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages.
People, yes. The possibility of one person using a copyrighted work that I uploaded to the internet is very different in scope to that of a corporation with billions of dollars in funding using the same work to generate a product that automates the creation of similar such works.
satvikpendem 2 days ago [-]
I agree. Back in the day hackers were for the free enablement and usage of all data, code and media included. Now it seems everyone has turned into copyright hawks which ironically only entrench big players via regulatory capture so say goodbye to actual open source AI models, they're too poor to license content while big tech companies can.
johannes1234321 2 days ago [-]
The mantra, at least in German hacker scene, is: "use public data, protect private data"
Published data is somewhere in the middle. But open source movement was always around copyright. FSF uses Copyright in Form of "copyleft" GPL for their agenda as does more business focussed open source movement. They are all purposely not using "public domain"
Yes, there is also the pirating scene, "opening" up works and pushing copyright law, but only few advocate complete abolishment of copyright.
satvikpendem 2 days ago [-]
Open source was always around copyright because it was in spite of copyright not because of it, to fight against the notion of copyright using copyright itself as a tool, with copyleft as you mentioned. That is to say, the goals or values of the open source movements would be much better achieved if there weren't copyright in the first place, especially now that it's twisted to serve only big corporations and how books from over 50 years ago still aren't in the public domain due to Mickey Mouse laws for example. I am one of those few who do advocate for its abolishment.
ghaff 2 days ago [-]
There are also potential legal issues with public domain, especially in Europe where some rights can't always be disclaimed. There are OSI open source public domain licenses like the MIT-0 license.
johannes1234321 2 days ago [-]
Correct, but still many projects use OS(I) licenses, which are beyond MIT-0. Thus some form of copyright is deemed relevant.
mystraline 2 days ago [-]
How hard is it to understand "I want to share what Ive done, but I dont want predatory companies taking my work, profiting on it, and offering absolutely nothing in return."
gasull 2 days ago [-]
It will end up distilled into open-weights models.
achierius 1 days ago [-]
Not if the big labs have anything to say about it! They're working to fix the 'problem', and with Mythos we no longer have any guarantees that the frontier will even be available to distill.
GaryBluto 2 days ago [-]
Do you think that if you write a book directly inspired by another you should be required to pay the author of the book that inspired you?
overfeed 2 days ago [-]
That's a false equivalence. Humans occasionally cause food poisoning at potlucks, and it's self-evident why we should hold McDonald's to a much higher standard due to the sheer scale of harm it can cause. A human, even when hopped up on stimulants, can't do a fraction of what a corporations with whole data centers can do.
GaryBluto 2 days ago [-]
It is in no way a false equivalence. Are you saying that if you write a book directly inspired by another you shouldn't be required to pay the author of the book that inspired you, unless you become successful, then you should be held to "higher standards"?
overfeed 2 days ago [-]
Biological humans are not, and should not be equivalent to corporations. There's a chasm in scale of execution, goals, and functional immortality.
Further case law established that I - a human - can create original work, if you are a non-human entity such as an LLM, or a monkey taking a picture, you cannot.
GaryBluto 2 days ago [-]
Remind me again what beings operate corporations.
overfeed 2 days ago [-]
...and you've moved to the fallacy of composition. You are made of cells (if human), but that doesn't mean you reproduce via mitosis, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
mystraline 2 days ago [-]
A company is a ship of Theses. Someone can die, and theyre replaced within 3 days. A new hire takes their place within a month (or used to). And legally, the comapny's sole responsibility is "make money for shareholders".
An analysis of 'what a company is', is fair to compare it to the most laser-focused sociopath.
But your false point is trying to say 'Since humans run a company, its human ethics and just humans'. And what we have is demonstrably not human-like.
The 2003 documentary film 'The Corporation' does a deep dive as why you are wrong, in regards to falsely equivocating humans to a corporation. The worst of the worst behaviors of sociopathic humans get selected more and more, all in the name of money.
This remains a matter of active debate, and there is no law that requires or enshrines it. It's a legitimate opinion to hold, that a company should maximize shareholder returns, but it is not in any way a requirement to do so.
Note that if shareholder primacy were the law of the land, this study could never have even occurred.
AlecSchueler 2 days ago [-]
Are these hypothetical books being written by "predatory companies?"
ashtonshears 2 days ago [-]
For some, feeding the beast is unpleasant
dicksicksknfis 2 days ago [-]
You cannot understand the fact that people don’t work their work stolen by corporations to train their very-much-for-profit bullshit generators… I mean, AI models?
Please.
GaryBluto 2 days ago [-]
> bullshit generators
Do you call operating systems "malware enablers"?
emkoemko 2 days ago [-]
i don't understand you want us to be happy that they take our work? so that their machine can reproduce it?
GaryBluto 2 days ago [-]
"They" don't "take your work", your work is still there, and it only reproduces said work in the way that anybody writing a fantasy novel inspired by Lord of the Rings is plagiarizing Lord of the Rings.
strogonoff 2 days ago [-]
The only way the “using LLM to create derivative works is the same as human being inspired” kind of argument works is if you consider LLMs to be conscious human-like beings with free will and capable of being inspired.
SlinkyOnStairs 2 days ago [-]
> Do you call operating systems "malware enablers"?
People were making that exact criticism of Microsoft Windows for decades.
It's only really in the last decade that Windows got decent enough at security for this attitude to wear off.
jrflowers 2 days ago [-]
> I cannot understand this mindset. People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages.
Right? On the one hand there was the mystery of what might happen with your photos and on the other there is the plain, inescapable knowledge that they will be donated to like four dude’s tech companies to make money off of without acknowledgement or compensation. That’s basically the same thing
emkoemko 2 days ago [-]
i guess people who don't create anything can't understand how this feels, the day you check one of those massive image dataset they train on and see all your images... horrible feeling
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
Hey, owner & CEO here. Reading this now, but AMA.
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
Just finished reading. Glad they captured what we're doing - photography & community - and what we're not - algorithmic feeds & privacy violations.
We have lots of work to do, and I think most of the criticisms are fair and on our road map. Small team, working hard, listening to customers. Like we've been doing for 24 years. (We're bootstrapped and privately owned, never taken VC).
AMA.
Nrbelex 2 days ago [-]
Author here. Glad this made its way to you. I've been chatting with Shay and don't have a ton of questions, but I'd just emphasize that even as Flickr continues to (rightfully!) modernize, please (a) don't drop the features that make it different than the closed social media platforms (e.g., RSS, open APIs, etc.) and (b) maintain and enhance the power features that make Flickr more than just a place to dump photos (e.g., would love to see a camera AND lens combination finder, search by EXIF, enhancements to the world map, etc.). Very much looking forward to more modern file types.
And while I think the site strikes the balance decently at the moment, Pro is too expensive for ads to get more intrusive (for the Pro user and for others looking at his/her photos).
But as I hope was clear, I'm a big supporter and would love to see the platform continue to thrive. If you're ever looking to bounce thoughts off a user, or anything else, I'm happy to help!
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
I'm too big of a nerd to let the RSS feeds, open APIs, etc go. :)
Alas, Flickr wouldn't even be alive if we hadn't increased the price ($$) and value (features) of Pro relative to things like intrusive ads on free accounts, etc. The very reason it's alive is because we have intrusive ads on free accounts, but no ads on Pro accounts, including for viewers. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
We have some great plans to further increase Pro's value, but we disagree that Pro is too expensive. Relative to our peers, it's a bargain for unlimited storage, advertising free, etc etc.
Love to bounce future ideas off of you, and thanks for the article!
Nrbelex 2 days ago [-]
I actually think we agree that the value proposition is currently there for pro, per what I laid out in the piece (though of course I look forward to things that will further increase its value). My comment was supposed to make clear that adding more ads to Pro could undermine that value—but it sounds like that's not the plan, which is great.
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
We’re allergic to ads. If I knew how to make Flickr work at its scale without ads even on free accounts, I’d do it.
Since I can’t figure it out (yet?), free accounts have ads and Pro don’t. As long as I’m running the show, that will remain true.
Tomte 2 days ago [-]
Is HEIC/HEIF support somewhere on the roadmap? I know people have been asking for years and you don‘t want to be a backup site, but display photos. But this whole conversion thing makes me uncomfortable anyway.
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
I want this, too. SmugMug (our other platform) supports them. So we already have the tech done (for a long time). I hope we add support on Flickr.
Eiriksmal 2 days ago [-]
I think I asked Nathan B all of my important Flickr-post-your-aquistion questions at a 7CTOs event way back in 2019, but that was a lifetime ago. Do you make enough money off my Flickr Pro subscription to keep it going indefinitely? I'd rather pay you then funnel more cash to AWS or Google for cloud backups, but I'm not a professional photographer, so the actual SmugMug products aren't valuable for me and there's always the slight dread that you kill Flickr because it's a blip of a side hustle to the main business.
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
Yes. Flickr was losing a ton of money (>$50M/year) when we bought it, and it's now cash flow positive and profitable. Not by a lot, alas, but the difference between $1 and $0 or less is the difference between life and death. Flickr is alive!
As I think the article captured pretty well, we could make a lot more money if we went the algorithmic-privacy-violating route, but we don't want to. So we aren't.
Since we never raised a round of funding, as long as the bills are getting paid, we can do what we want - build a company for the long-term based on a great photography community. So that's what we're doing. :)
eddyzh 2 days ago [-]
Thank you. This is great to hear!
dawolf- 2 days ago [-]
Good to hear. Still happily paying for Pro every year and using the API to pull images into my website.
relistan 2 days ago [-]
And, thank you for that! Still my favorite site on the internet.
tiffanyh 2 days ago [-]
FYI - I loved reading your blog posts ~20 years ago about how you were building your server infrastructure (hardware, dedicated, onprem, etc).
If any more recent post exist on similar topics, I’d be fascinated to read more.
I do a lot of event photography as a creative outlet. I want my friends to be able to download individual photos and photo albums easily. As an example, I just photographed a fundraiser for my rugby team last week, and I made all my shots available in a Google Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PfwHpEJejywBRiZp7
And while that works, I don’t necessarily love feeding all my creative content into the Google machine. I would rather support a diverse photography ecosystem.
Have you explored making downloading individual photos and albums a prominent feature? Mind you, I realize I am weird photographer who does this stuff for free, and I don’t care about attribution or watermarks. I just want my friends to be able to get their photos easily.
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
Thanks for the feedback and feature request. I don't hear this request often for Flickr, but it's a core and beloved feature on our other platform, SmugMug, which you might want to check out if you haven't.
stevenicr 2 days ago [-]
whats the current censorship level?
I seem to recall a buyout and some kind of 'certain things are no longer allowed' changes.
Similar thing happened with tumblr, then they semi-reversed a little but not a lot I think.
Stopped using both because losing content and accounts with no customer support is the internet way apparently.
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
We rely on self- and community-moderation. As long as content is flagged appropriately, we allow and embrace content that's often banned on other platforms, such as artistic nudes.
We do have real, human, in-house customer support. It's good and fast.
stevenicr 21 hours ago [-]
When an account is banned does support offer an export?
My experience with similar 'some things are okay, we know it when we see it' - is that support is extremely hostile if it responds (vimeo) .. non-existant if you are banned (google, meta / facebook)
and most often "sorry everything is deleted, your content, friends list, messages - all gone." (all of the above including tumblr)
So yeah, building content and friend's lists on other people's farmland is a thing of the past. with censorship that costs you friends and data people are better off self hosting and doing the fediverse thing, or going to places that explicitly allow almost all explicit things.
There was a time when flickr was very cool for sharing and making friends with people in niches that was to hard find in many places, same with tumblr and it was ruined in a similar way.
It's fine, and I completely understand, it's just not what it once was. Many things are not.
joenot443 2 days ago [-]
That list is super reasonable, FWIW.
No hate speech, no Nazis, no pornography, no weird screenshots, no spam.
Nothing surprised me, basically what I’d expect.
onethumb 1 days ago [-]
Thanks! We think so. :)
RobotToaster 2 days ago [-]
Have you considered offering free storage for freely licensed (cc-by & cc-by-sa) works?
I want to share my photos under a free license, but the one thing that always put me off Flickr was that I would have to pay an indefinite subscription to contribute to the commons.
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
As far as I know, we haven't considered that, but it's a good idea. I'll noodle on it. Thanks!
snowwrestler 2 days ago [-]
Is that not what Wikimedia is for?
drcongo 2 days ago [-]
Hello. I just logged in for the first time in a while and it asked me to verify my age, despite the fact that my Flickr account is 22 years old. I've been paying for Flickr Pro as long as that has been possible, if I remember correctly, my Flickr user number was ~620. Surely, with an account that's 22 years old you don't need to hand my personal information to Peter Thiel?
To some degree I only still pay for it out of nostalgia for what it was. I stopped using it when it started trying to upload my entire camera roll every time I opened the mobile app - Flickr was never about storing all your photos on someone else's server, it was about curation and community. It somewhat lost that as phone photography got more popular, and instead of empowering users to do that directly on their phone, it presented itself as a mere backup utility. The app seems to be entirely non-functional now, no content loads at all for me. Flickr's failure to move with the rise mobile photography feels like its biggest misstep - age verification for an account that is 22 years old though might actually convince me to stop paying. I'm not using it, the mobile app is broken, and now it wants to hand my PII to a third party.
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
We have a lot of mobile usage and the app works fine, so I'd love to know more about what you're experiencing with it. Can you contact our Support Heroes so we can assist? https://www.flickrhelp.com/
You make a fair point about the age verification thing. I'll look into it. It's probably based on a legal requirement that we have to deal with, even if the solution is silly. Sorry about that.
tito 2 days ago [-]
Hey, it's Saturday night and I'm on Hacker News woot woot.
I work on climate technology (sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky), and I have a side quest to create a "Freedom to Breathe" mural in Manhattan before the upcoming New York Climate Week. Might be up your alley knowing artists and photographers. How interested are you in working together on making a mural?
chromacity 2 days ago [-]
At the peak of its popularity, Flickr was an interesting glimpse of the coming age of algorithmic homogeneity. In the mid-2010s, most of their top photos looked basically the same: heavily shopped, oversaturated HDR landscapes.
I stopped using Flickr around the time they started flirting with bait-and-switch strategies - "we'll hide / delete your old photos unless you pay" - so maybe things have gotten better... although I see that artificially-looking landscapes still dominate their "trending" page (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags).
Anyway, my general takeaway is that things are more interesting on photo sites where engagement isn't driven primarily by a global popularity ranking. You just come across thought-provoking work more often.
FireBeyond 2 days ago [-]
> At the peak of its popularity, Flickr was an interesting glimpse of the coming age of algorithmic homogeneity. In the mid-2010s, most of their top photos looked basically the same: heavily shopped, oversaturated HDR landscapes.
I agree with that. And then I moved to 500px, and it was the same. Started off promising, became very homogenous. Landscapes like you say, and the People sections were heavy with Eastern European semi-soft focus nudes in nature.
paradox460 2 days ago [-]
One thing I can say about 500px is that it's one of the few Internet properties I made money on without really having to do anything more than just use it (newsvine was the other)
I uploaded a bunch of photos once, forgot about them, and then a year or two later got an email asking to license them for commercial/stock use
altairprime 2 days ago [-]
A company bought them so that they weren’t shutdown from revenue loss, and then instituted a policy of “pay for what you like” to resolve uncontrollable storage costs. Sounds like every other “free at first” cloud provider, and one should reasonably expect the same from any “freemium unlimited” present-day or future provider as well. I’m not faulting you for taking offense at it, but that’s not bait and switch, that’s bog standard normal business, and why I’ll never again post my photos to a free site. If they aren’t charging me now, they’re going to piss me off someday when they either do charge me or spontaneously collapse before ArchiveTeam gets ahold of them.
ajdude 2 days ago [-]
I've been a pro member for many years, with about 35k photos uploaded. I am grateful that they have never chased the engagement bait. Some people like to complain about the Pro features but I found them to be absolutely fair and I wanna do everything I can to support this platform.
All of my photos are automatically synced to Flickr via the Auto uploader, and getting things from my camera to Flickr is as simple as transferring the data from the dslr to my phone, and the auto uploader takes care of the rest.
From there I can go through the photos, decide which ones I wanna make public, and organize them into my albums to share with others.
My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
Can you elaborate on the markdown embed request? In which contexts would you want that?
They have bbcode and html embed, with dynamic width and automatic linking back to the page with alt text, but nothing for markdown.
I can use HTML for my blog but my blog is written and marked down and I would rather just stick to markdown, plus many forums have switched to markdown and won't accept an HTML embed.
My current solution is to convert the following by hand from something like
[](www.flickr.com/photos/uname/1234)
For every photo I like to share which can be a lot when I am blogging...
QuantumNomad_ 2 days ago [-]
> My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
fwiw, a lot of markdown parsers allow some amount of HTML also.
Pasting a html img tag into your markdown documents might work, depending on which parser is used.
etra0 2 days ago [-]
Lately I've been enjoying photography a lot but Flickr never clicked for me. Instagram nowadays is almost unusable for this as it prioritizes reels too much and 500px... I liked that one more than Flickr.
Right now, I'm using glass.photo and I actually quite like it. You have to pay, though, which is a high entrance barrier, but I feel the quality of what I see in the site is great, the platform works nicely and the community has been welcoming so far.
I yearn for a good site to share and comment photos which is a bit more open, though.
darekkay 2 days ago [-]
There's also Irys (from Alan Schaller). It's more open than Glass, as it's a freemium model, but it's also more closed at the same time, as it doesn't offer a web-based version. It's probably even more photographer-oriented than Glass. For something truly open, there's Pixelfed. All those platforms have their pros and cons, especially regarding the audience. Personally, I publish all my photos on my own website and syndicate them to (in order of preference): Glass, Pixelfed, Instagram, Irys.
etra0 2 days ago [-]
I've tried Irys as well but the mobile only is kind of a deal breaker for me — I like seeing images in the big monitor to appreciate them more.
Of course I also have my webpage to showcase my favourite pictures but I feel I'm more picky in that site than in, say, Glass and instagram, since I want to show 'the best' there :-)
dopa42365 2 days ago [-]
>it doesn't offer a web-based version
>It's probably even more photographer-oriented
not even remotely serious? ridiculous
Tomte 2 days ago [-]
I just tried glass.photo. It doesn‘t allow to upload more than 10 photos at once, and if you upload 2 or more you have to put them in a so-called series (like an album?).
alex1138 2 days ago [-]
This is less a pro-Flickr than an anti-Insta but I absolutely refuse to sign up for the latter
Zuck purely bought it to murder competition in the crib
I'm not going to sign up for it just because he put a hard login wall ("look at how many users we have!")
He kills art, he kills organic reach, all his products turn into spam, 97 ads per real post
amatecha 2 days ago [-]
IG was cool when it started, but yeah, its acquisition (and shortly before) was such a swift downhill slide. Haven't even logged into my account in years and years.
alex1138 2 days ago [-]
People have this real tendency to say x never would have accomplished y, when in fact the ecosystem was ripe for it
The Winklevoss twins, whose project Zuckerberg intentionally delayed while he got to market first (whatever it was. I don't know exactly. Some say it was only a dating site. Some say they used bootstrapping effects to onboard colleges first). It was 2003 or whatever. It very well could've disrupted Myspace or Friendster and made them multi billionaires
"Instagram had no users" people really liked Instagram. It could've taken off, if it wasn't already
Whatsapp - Whatsapp was profitable. Now Zuck has access to your phone numbers
Stop a) whitewashing his history and b) stop assuming "blah never would have accomplished". That's an utterly bizarre take in the face of theft
khazhoux 2 days ago [-]
> Zuck purely bought it to murder competition in the crib
That makes no sense. It’s very obviously been nurtured and grown by orders of magnitude since acquisition.
procaryote 2 days ago [-]
Turning it into a copy of facebook
FireBeyond 2 days ago [-]
In a very different direction. Photos are almost a second class citizen on IG now. Stories. Reels. Shit, a quarter of my feed is (very repetitive) ads.
It's absolutely grown, but the concept of IG was definitely "de-prioritized".
keane 2 days ago [-]
Flickr has been mentioned in interviews by the founders of both Vimeo and YouTube as having been a direct inspiration on the creation of both of those sites. It got a lot of the design right the first time. Flickr and the projects that emerged out of the context it pioneered changed the world.
TrackerFF 1 days ago [-]
Still use it. It's a treasure trove of photos from 2004 - 2015, and easy to search / filter.
It's a crying shame that instagram "won" the photo war, because it is straight up impossible to search / filter through.
I considered Flickr as a place for my photography portfolio, but I can't recommend it to anyone. Try sharing a portfolio link with someone who doesn't have an account there. It'll open with these nasty pop-ups, even if you have the paid version.
So I looked for a good alternative and found the paid https://glass.photo/ -- almost no one uses it, the service probably won't survive the next 5-10 years, but at least the UI/UX is done with some thought
sborsje 1 days ago [-]
Actually… Glass has a pretty stable base and consistent month-over-month growth. It has a sustainable business model, has been profitable since day 1, and is immune to investor pressure (it has none). I think it’ll be fine.
jeffbee 2 days ago [-]
To me, Flickr is the better Photo.net. Photo.net has been around since 1993 and apparently is still running, but it never was a site where you could just collect your own work and share them the way you wanted. It would be interesting to read about how Flickr succeeded against an older, established competitor.
esafak 2 days ago [-]
photo.net is the water cooler. flickr is the portfolio. They're different. I never talked to anyone on flickr. I'm still friends with people from photo.net
jeffbee 2 days ago [-]
photo.net is more like a public ridicule session that Maoists would have dreamed up. It was impossible to just post a photo there without every rando on the site feeling like they needed to criticize your composition and exposure.
oflannabhra 2 days ago [-]
SmugMug is pretty great.
ghaff 2 days ago [-]
Which is basically a "pro-ish-plus" version of Flickr from the same owners as far as I know. I've been a Pro user of Flickr for a long time but probably hard to justify at this point which probably means that it's even harder to justify for the average consumer. Interviewewed them back in the day when they were a prominent AWS customer.
neonnomad 1 days ago [-]
I still remember their Sun Server JBOD posts.
dlcarrier 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, they should buy Flickr and abandon the whole social media aspect and just turn it into an exact copy of SmugMug, but interleave the pricing tiers.
It would really be crazy if they did that, but they claimed that limiting the number of photos users could upload, instead of limiting the quality, somehow made it more like a social media platform.
FireBeyond 2 days ago [-]
I haven't been to SmugMug in years (decade?) but wow, holy early 2000s big bold brash neon web design. Then there's this huge scrolling ticker in 72pt text at the top, "free festival passes for the next 50 subscribers" that has been there ... for a few days now. Gives total "You may already be a winner!" vibes.
kasperset 2 days ago [-]
I think I like about Flickr is the add a note feature. Not sure if other platforms has any similar feature but I find it helpful for me to add note on part on the photo for future reference such as place or anything peculiar.
Scoundreller 2 days ago [-]
What, no shade on photobucket?
Single handedly created a lot of issues for anyone maintaining old cars…
101008 2 days ago [-]
oh man, I haven't heard of photobucket in years! A great place for those nostalgics of the old web, especially if you used forums. Photobucket was THE srvice to upload images to post on forums, including the "famous" signatures, gifs, etc.
sunaookami 1 days ago [-]
Don't forget ImageShack!
rado 2 days ago [-]
They introduced a limit to 1000 photos, I deleted almost everything, then somehow they didn’t go through with the limitation, only warning me about nearing 1000 photos. Anyone knows what exactly happened?
neoCrimeLabs 2 days ago [-]
Great?
I remember that time I reported someone for reposting my images.
Flickr's response was deleting my profile, all of my photos, and not responding to any of my attempts to contact them.
On the upside, it was a good lesson to not trust service providers.
onethumb 2 days ago [-]
Doesn't sound like us. When was this?
neoCrimeLabs 2 days ago [-]
2008-ish?
givemeethekeys 2 days ago [-]
Was this before or after Yahoo! purchased! them?!
neoCrimeLabs 2 days ago [-]
After Yahoo
givemeethekeys 55 minutes ago [-]
Figures. I can't think of any Yahoo acquisitions that thrived after they bought them.
ymolodtsov 2 days ago [-]
In the last few years I've tried multiple photo hosting options. 500px, Flickr, Unsplash.
In the end, I just built my own photo blog on Hugo with SveltiaCMS (thanks Claude). I don't care much about the social part per se, just want a place to host my photo journeys.
Tomte 2 days ago [-]
For a simple static "here are my photos", I‘ve found https://github.com/bep/gallerydeluxe today, and really like the focus on photos, not UI and thingies flying in and out of the viewport all the time.
etra0 1 days ago [-]
haha did something similar. Ended up vibe-coding something with Hugo and using backblaze + cloudflare proxy to host the images. So far everything has been free and I have a snappy 'portfolio' :-)'
sjia 2 days ago [-]
Instagram didn’t kill Flickr by being better for photographers, but by being better at distribution.
chromacity 2 days ago [-]
I'm not sure if this is what you mean by "distribution", but I think Instagram won by being content-consumption-centric. People who used Flickr were mostly other photographers. People on Instagram are mostly your customers: people planning their own weddings, moms with newborn children, etc. It's basically a marketing platform, so it's a no-brainer for current or aspiring pros.
It sucks for passionate hobbyists, but photography is first and foremost an industry.
zimpenfish 2 days ago [-]
Also the friction of uploading a photo from iOS was (and pretty much still is, despite Instagram's best efforts to enshittify their app) much, much lower for Instagram.
If the Flickr app had had a "quick upload" flow like Instagram, they might have had a chance but (like almost everything Yahoo! did) they fumbled badly and wasted any potential they had.
kasperset 2 days ago [-]
@onethumb Is it possible that Flickr will be integrated into SmugMug eventually or it will remain as its own branch? I know it is difficult to say for sure but some direction for near future?
satvikpendem 2 days ago [-]
No mention of Picasa?
sgerenser 2 days ago [-]
It turned into Google Photos quite a while ago, so not really sure how it’s relevant anymore.
amatecha 2 days ago [-]
Been using Flickr since 2005, and been paying for Pro since 2015 (it cost $24.95 then). It's still the best photo-sharing community, by far.
Pretty disappointed my Pro subscription somehow increased by 60% this year. That's pretty uncool. I guess all the crippling of free accounts still hasn't reduced costs enough, or something. It's bad enough you can never see original size on free accounts anymore (even though I'm now paying $135/year!), apparently reduction in functionality that was theoretically supposed to keep costs down still hasn't prevented a continual escalation of Pro subscription cost (regardless of my minimal usage of the site).
Gigachad 2 days ago [-]
It's very single purpose, but there's Furtrack for fursuit photography. One of the few sites that leaves photos in full quality rather than compressing them down to 1-2 megapixels.
It's been such a tragedy that we now have such good quality cameras, yet all the media we consume is incredibly downscaled and compressed to save money.
Kye 2 days ago [-]
Furtrack seems to suffer from the same problem a lot of photo sharing sites do: the only people who visit are the subjects and other photographers.
Tens, hundreds of photos for each suit, but almost no views.
Gigachad 1 days ago [-]
I do wish they added some more interesting viewing modes. But their primary goal has been to link photographers with fursuiters, often people who don't know each other or have contact details. A huge improvement over having to dig through google drive folders and personal websites for your photos.
Sadly social media has very much taken over for casual viewing.
mihaaly 1 days ago [-]
I was active there before 2010. I liked taking photos, good gear, interesting perspectives, and Flickr was a great way to explore the work of other like-minded folks, usually with much better photos than mine.
The only thing I disliked was the mandatory Yahoo email, that I had no other use. I knew I would eventually lock myself out, and I did. I forgot about Flickr.
Until about a year ago when I went back out of nostalgia, tried to recover my access, and succeeded! Big thanks and kudos to the team allowing that with other email! Unfortunately, I am not that active anymore; my life has changed, and I no longer have enough time and energy for good photos. Still, will be back from time to time.
carlosjobim 2 days ago [-]
If you want to see the future of photo platforms like Flickr, you should download the cooliris.swf file from here:
This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities. In ten or so years, everybody will use it for multimedia.
_spduchamp 1 days ago [-]
Anyone reading this who was part of the Toronto Flickr Meetups, just sayin Howdy! Long time, no see.
avazhi 2 days ago [-]
Flickr wasn't the first, and it sure wasn't great. It was just popular. The MySpace of image hosting would be apt, down to how awful using the website was.
I really loved all the places where they snuck in "Game Never Ending" in the product, because they didn't set out to make a photo sharing product, but steered hard into that.
Flickr was the only property which was allowed their own version of PHP and despite having PHP inside, every single URL said ".gne" (Game Never Ending). I worked for the PHP team and that was my only excuse to show up to work in the SF office instead of being stuck in Sunnyvale when visiting the US.
They had all the right bits of architecture built out - rest of Yahoo had great code (like vespa or the graph behind Yahoo 360), but everything was more complex than it should be.
Flickr had the simplest possible approach that worked and they tried it before building anything more complex - the image urls, the resize queues, the way albums were stored, machine-tags, gps co-ordinates.
I also took a lot of photos to put up on flickr, trying to get featured on the explore page up front - it was like getting published in a magazine.
Every presentation I made had CC images backed by flickr, it was a true commons to share and take.
And then Instagram happened.
The elegance of flickr is just nice and browsing is fun.
I wonder if there are more sites like it.
I still have my account and old photos there. And because I licensed most of them as CC, a couple of them landed on Wikipedia because of that - felt nice.
as someone who goes down many rabbit holes on wikipedia, i appreciate this comment and all of those CC photos
It’s cool that they used PHP, I always thought it was RoR platform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Pipes
From my point of view Yahoo destroyed Flickr. I was a happy user for many years and lost access to my photos due to authentication changes. At least Google had the decency to just shut down Reader as opposed to Yahoo's enshittification of a product that sparked joy.
The community isn’t the same of course, but the platform itself is a joy to use again - especially as someone who got tired of Instagram when it stopped being about photography.
I was there pretty early. I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr that my Pro account upload quota was upgraded to 2GB monthly.
Made many friends via my photos, online and in-real-life. Many of my photos became pretty popular and picked (stolen a lot too) up by major newspapers/publications in India, USA, and even in Vietnam. Some even bought the original copy and rights. It was never my intention to sell my photos nor will that ever be but my guestimate is that I sold quite a lot (high single digit thousands of dollars).
I donated and gifted a lot of Pro accounts to people who asked, mostly students and thos who commented nicely on my blog. Many of my payments comes to Paypal and it got accumulated and there were no ways to get the money to India (for a very long time). So, I just used it to gift to others.
Before I stopped using it more than a decade ago. It had garnered over 10+ million views and my tenure with Flickr lasted almost a decade.
I’ve taken backups/takeout but do not have the heart to delete my account yet. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/
He made Bulkr, which was one of those tools that just works and super easy to use, in getting all of your photos offline from Flickr. I don't think it works anymore. His revenue and hits went crazy after Veronica Belmont talked about it.
https://brajeshwar.com/2011/bulkr-access-and-backup-your-fli...
Elrond?
They deleted all but the newest 100 or so for the free accounts
The photos are still there. I don't have PRO and my 2772 images can still be seen, even by logged out visitors. I can't upload anything though.
(I am not really mad at them btw.)
Secondly, it makes use of and exposes EXIF data. I really, really lament the Instagrammification of online photography, where the only aspect ration was 1:1, terrible resolution, no EXIF data, and certainly no easy way to link a photo to anything outside of Instagram. That EXIF data makes it so much easier to search photos - although it could do with some AI autotagging. Surely that's coming down the pike...
Lastly, it's like an internet time capsule. There are accounts that started in the early 2000s and haven't been touched since the 2010s, and you can still pull full resolution imagery from there. And there are people even more old fashioned (and probably even more old) than me, still uploading new photos and old slides.
It sucks that Yahoo didn't do anything with Instagram, but I'm glad it also managed to avoid completely destroying it.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...
Nowadays, I have a locally hosted Immich instance. It's great as personal photo archive, but is missing the social features.
To be honest, with the advent of GenAI, I'm now reluctant to share my photos publicly because I don't like the feeling that my work will be slurped up for AI model training..
Enforcement is another things but photographers and artists have had ways to push back against illicit use of their work, notably by larger corporations. Licensing is an industry based on this protection alone.
The difference is that now, large corporations with plenty of money are able to just swallow other people’s work and pretend it’s “fair use” and derivative enough that they wash their hand of the fact that their models, that they charge lots of money for, would not be able to output anything they were not trained on. At least you could argue that a large image model would have a hard time creating a picture of a cat if it hadn’t been fed pictures of cats that belonged to other people than the company producing the model.
I don’t know if training on the world’s data without compensation is fair or not. There are valid arguments both ways, but as an individual, it should still be your choice whether you want to allow your work to be used in ways you do not agree with.
I think people at large expect at least recognition, and if possible, compensation, for their creations.
When a consumption system is built around providing neither, I don’t think we should be surprised that people feel slighted.
Is this true? Remember that Harlan Ellison plagiarism case, the nightmare he went through to get a payout? It seems the vast majority of times, when a corporation decides it wants to use something you created, it gets to just do so because it has more capital than you.
Yes, it is.
I'm a previous career, I was a professional photographer. I spent a lot of time chasing after companies that operated with the "if it's in the internet, it must be free" mindset. The right letters, sent the right way, to the right people almost always gets things fixed.
In one example, a very major bank used one of my photos as the cover of a corporate report. That mistake paid my rent for a little over a year.
Like I said, the right message sent to the right person in the right way works 90% of the time.
This comes from actual experience, not just some rando second-guesser on the internet who thinks his suppositions are truth.
People, yes. The possibility of one person using a copyrighted work that I uploaded to the internet is very different in scope to that of a corporation with billions of dollars in funding using the same work to generate a product that automates the creation of similar such works.
Published data is somewhere in the middle. But open source movement was always around copyright. FSF uses Copyright in Form of "copyleft" GPL for their agenda as does more business focussed open source movement. They are all purposely not using "public domain"
Yes, there is also the pirating scene, "opening" up works and pushing copyright law, but only few advocate complete abolishment of copyright.
Further case law established that I - a human - can create original work, if you are a non-human entity such as an LLM, or a monkey taking a picture, you cannot.
An analysis of 'what a company is', is fair to compare it to the most laser-focused sociopath.
But your false point is trying to say 'Since humans run a company, its human ethics and just humans'. And what we have is demonstrably not human-like.
The 2003 documentary film 'The Corporation' does a deep dive as why you are wrong, in regards to falsely equivocating humans to a corporation. The worst of the worst behaviors of sociopathic humans get selected more and more, all in the name of money.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6v8e7dUwq_Q
"the philosophy of putting shareholder profits over all else is a matter of ideology which is not grounded in American law or tradition"
https://www.salon.com/2012/04/04/the_shareholder_fallacy/
This remains a matter of active debate, and there is no law that requires or enshrines it. It's a legitimate opinion to hold, that a company should maximize shareholder returns, but it is not in any way a requirement to do so.
Here's a recent study on the matter: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/06/12/the-costs-of-weak...
Note that if shareholder primacy were the law of the land, this study could never have even occurred.
Please.
Do you call operating systems "malware enablers"?
People were making that exact criticism of Microsoft Windows for decades.
It's only really in the last decade that Windows got decent enough at security for this attitude to wear off.
Right? On the one hand there was the mystery of what might happen with your photos and on the other there is the plain, inescapable knowledge that they will be donated to like four dude’s tech companies to make money off of without acknowledgement or compensation. That’s basically the same thing
We have lots of work to do, and I think most of the criticisms are fair and on our road map. Small team, working hard, listening to customers. Like we've been doing for 24 years. (We're bootstrapped and privately owned, never taken VC).
AMA.
And while I think the site strikes the balance decently at the moment, Pro is too expensive for ads to get more intrusive (for the Pro user and for others looking at his/her photos).
But as I hope was clear, I'm a big supporter and would love to see the platform continue to thrive. If you're ever looking to bounce thoughts off a user, or anything else, I'm happy to help!
Alas, Flickr wouldn't even be alive if we hadn't increased the price ($$) and value (features) of Pro relative to things like intrusive ads on free accounts, etc. The very reason it's alive is because we have intrusive ads on free accounts, but no ads on Pro accounts, including for viewers. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
We have some great plans to further increase Pro's value, but we disagree that Pro is too expensive. Relative to our peers, it's a bargain for unlimited storage, advertising free, etc etc.
Love to bounce future ideas off of you, and thanks for the article!
Since I can’t figure it out (yet?), free accounts have ads and Pro don’t. As long as I’m running the show, that will remain true.
As I think the article captured pretty well, we could make a lot more money if we went the algorithmic-privacy-violating route, but we don't want to. So we aren't.
Since we never raised a round of funding, as long as the bills are getting paid, we can do what we want - build a company for the long-term based on a great photography community. So that's what we're doing. :)
If any more recent post exist on similar topics, I’d be fascinated to read more.
https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/
I do a lot of event photography as a creative outlet. I want my friends to be able to download individual photos and photo albums easily. As an example, I just photographed a fundraiser for my rugby team last week, and I made all my shots available in a Google Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PfwHpEJejywBRiZp7
And while that works, I don’t necessarily love feeding all my creative content into the Google machine. I would rather support a diverse photography ecosystem.
Have you explored making downloading individual photos and albums a prominent feature? Mind you, I realize I am weird photographer who does this stuff for free, and I don’t care about attribution or watermarks. I just want my friends to be able to get their photos easily.
I seem to recall a buyout and some kind of 'certain things are no longer allowed' changes.
Similar thing happened with tumblr, then they semi-reversed a little but not a lot I think.
Stopped using both because losing content and accounts with no customer support is the internet way apparently.
Not everything is allowed, though - here's the list: https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/20529310987796-...
We do have real, human, in-house customer support. It's good and fast.
My experience with similar 'some things are okay, we know it when we see it' - is that support is extremely hostile if it responds (vimeo) .. non-existant if you are banned (google, meta / facebook)
and most often "sorry everything is deleted, your content, friends list, messages - all gone." (all of the above including tumblr)
So yeah, building content and friend's lists on other people's farmland is a thing of the past. with censorship that costs you friends and data people are better off self hosting and doing the fediverse thing, or going to places that explicitly allow almost all explicit things.
There was a time when flickr was very cool for sharing and making friends with people in niches that was to hard find in many places, same with tumblr and it was ruined in a similar way.
It's fine, and I completely understand, it's just not what it once was. Many things are not.
No hate speech, no Nazis, no pornography, no weird screenshots, no spam.
Nothing surprised me, basically what I’d expect.
I want to share my photos under a free license, but the one thing that always put me off Flickr was that I would have to pay an indefinite subscription to contribute to the commons.
To some degree I only still pay for it out of nostalgia for what it was. I stopped using it when it started trying to upload my entire camera roll every time I opened the mobile app - Flickr was never about storing all your photos on someone else's server, it was about curation and community. It somewhat lost that as phone photography got more popular, and instead of empowering users to do that directly on their phone, it presented itself as a mere backup utility. The app seems to be entirely non-functional now, no content loads at all for me. Flickr's failure to move with the rise mobile photography feels like its biggest misstep - age verification for an account that is 22 years old though might actually convince me to stop paying. I'm not using it, the mobile app is broken, and now it wants to hand my PII to a third party.
You make a fair point about the age verification thing. I'll look into it. It's probably based on a legal requirement that we have to deal with, even if the solution is silly. Sorry about that.
I work on climate technology (sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky), and I have a side quest to create a "Freedom to Breathe" mural in Manhattan before the upcoming New York Climate Week. Might be up your alley knowing artists and photographers. How interested are you in working together on making a mural?
I stopped using Flickr around the time they started flirting with bait-and-switch strategies - "we'll hide / delete your old photos unless you pay" - so maybe things have gotten better... although I see that artificially-looking landscapes still dominate their "trending" page (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags).
Anyway, my general takeaway is that things are more interesting on photo sites where engagement isn't driven primarily by a global popularity ranking. You just come across thought-provoking work more often.
I agree with that. And then I moved to 500px, and it was the same. Started off promising, became very homogenous. Landscapes like you say, and the People sections were heavy with Eastern European semi-soft focus nudes in nature.
I uploaded a bunch of photos once, forgot about them, and then a year or two later got an email asking to license them for commercial/stock use
All of my photos are automatically synced to Flickr via the Auto uploader, and getting things from my camera to Flickr is as simple as transferring the data from the dslr to my phone, and the auto uploader takes care of the rest.
From there I can go through the photos, decide which ones I wanna make public, and organize them into my albums to share with others.
My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
They have bbcode and html embed, with dynamic width and automatic linking back to the page with alt text, but nothing for markdown.
I can use HTML for my blog but my blog is written and marked down and I would rather just stick to markdown, plus many forums have switched to markdown and won't accept an HTML embed.
My current solution is to convert the following by hand from something like
To: For every photo I like to share which can be a lot when I am blogging...fwiw, a lot of markdown parsers allow some amount of HTML also.
Pasting a html img tag into your markdown documents might work, depending on which parser is used.
Right now, I'm using glass.photo and I actually quite like it. You have to pay, though, which is a high entrance barrier, but I feel the quality of what I see in the site is great, the platform works nicely and the community has been welcoming so far.
I yearn for a good site to share and comment photos which is a bit more open, though.
Of course I also have my webpage to showcase my favourite pictures but I feel I'm more picky in that site than in, say, Glass and instagram, since I want to show 'the best' there :-)
>It's probably even more photographer-oriented
not even remotely serious? ridiculous
Zuck purely bought it to murder competition in the crib
I'm not going to sign up for it just because he put a hard login wall ("look at how many users we have!")
He kills art, he kills organic reach, all his products turn into spam, 97 ads per real post
The Winklevoss twins, whose project Zuckerberg intentionally delayed while he got to market first (whatever it was. I don't know exactly. Some say it was only a dating site. Some say they used bootstrapping effects to onboard colleges first). It was 2003 or whatever. It very well could've disrupted Myspace or Friendster and made them multi billionaires
"Instagram had no users" people really liked Instagram. It could've taken off, if it wasn't already
Whatsapp - Whatsapp was profitable. Now Zuck has access to your phone numbers
Stop a) whitewashing his history and b) stop assuming "blah never would have accomplished". That's an utterly bizarre take in the face of theft
That makes no sense. It’s very obviously been nurtured and grown by orders of magnitude since acquisition.
It's absolutely grown, but the concept of IG was definitely "de-prioritized".
It's a crying shame that instagram "won" the photo war, because it is straight up impossible to search / filter through.
So I looked for a good alternative and found the paid https://glass.photo/ -- almost no one uses it, the service probably won't survive the next 5-10 years, but at least the UI/UX is done with some thought
It would really be crazy if they did that, but they claimed that limiting the number of photos users could upload, instead of limiting the quality, somehow made it more like a social media platform.
Single handedly created a lot of issues for anyone maintaining old cars…
I remember that time I reported someone for reposting my images.
Flickr's response was deleting my profile, all of my photos, and not responding to any of my attempts to contact them.
On the upside, it was a good lesson to not trust service providers.
In the end, I just built my own photo blog on Hugo with SveltiaCMS (thanks Claude). I don't care much about the social part per se, just want a place to host my photo journeys.
It sucks for passionate hobbyists, but photography is first and foremost an industry.
If the Flickr app had had a "quick upload" flow like Instagram, they might have had a chance but (like almost everything Yahoo! did) they fumbled badly and wasted any potential they had.
Pretty disappointed my Pro subscription somehow increased by 60% this year. That's pretty uncool. I guess all the crippling of free accounts still hasn't reduced costs enough, or something. It's bad enough you can never see original size on free accounts anymore (even though I'm now paying $135/year!), apparently reduction in functionality that was theoretically supposed to keep costs down still hasn't prevented a continual escalation of Pro subscription cost (regardless of my minimal usage of the site).
It's been such a tragedy that we now have such good quality cameras, yet all the media we consume is incredibly downscaled and compressed to save money.
For example: https://www.furtrack.com/index/species:fennec_fox
Tens, hundreds of photos for each suit, but almost no views.
Sadly social media has very much taken over for casual viewing.
The only thing I disliked was the mandatory Yahoo email, that I had no other use. I knew I would eventually lock myself out, and I did. I forgot about Flickr.
Until about a year ago when I went back out of nostalgia, tried to recover my access, and succeeded! Big thanks and kudos to the team allowing that with other email! Unfortunately, I am not that active anymore; my life has changed, and I no longer have enough time and energy for good photos. Still, will be back from time to time.
https://github.com/cooliris/embed-wall
If you're on MacOS, you can run the file with this software:
https://ruffle.rs
This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities. In ten or so years, everybody will use it for multimedia.
It was atrocious.