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
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.
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..
I cannot understand this mindset. People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages.
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.
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.
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
Please.
Do you call operating systems "malware enablers"?
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!
If any more recent post exist on similar topics, I’d be fascinated to read more.
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. :)
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.
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 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.
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.
It's a crying shame that instagram "won" the photo war, because it is straight up impossible to search / filter through.
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
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/uname/1234/" title="My Title"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/1234/abcd.jpg" width="1024" height="768" alt="My Alt Text" /></a>
[](www.flickr.com/photos/uname/1234)
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Single handedly created a lot of issues for anyone maintaining old cars…
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.
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.
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.
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
That makes no sense. It’s very obviously been nurtured and grown by orders of magnitude since acquisition.
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.
https://github.com/cooliris/embed-wall
If you're on MacOS, you can run the file with this software:
This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities. In ten or so years, everybody will use it for multimedia.
It was atrocious.