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What if Flickr fails?

blogs.law.harvard.edu

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Re: What if Flickr fails?

#31

Post by ja27 »

thwarted wrote: post #23
ja27 wrote: post #16

I've paid for a Flickr pro account for a few years now. Ironically, I first got on Flickr when Yahoo Photos shut down and they forcefully migrated me to Flickr. But I'm letting my pro account expire this month. I've been using Flickr for 2 main purposes: sharing photos with friends and backing up all my photos. It hasn't been great for either. No matter how many guest passes and invites I mail friends, most of them o…

Facebook keeps improving their photo service - removing album limits, increasing resolution. Flickr both doesn't limit how many photos can be in a set or collection and provides the original resolution (at least for the pro account, I don't remember what the free account's limits are). These "improvements" Facebook is making is just catching up to flickr's base functionality. Obviously, Facebook may be more compellin…

For the most part I like the Flickr UI. It takes a bit to understand photostreams, sets, collections, and group pools, and the online organizer is a little different. But for the most part it's efficient and is broken a lot less of the time that Facebook's photos.

But my average friend that would go look at my Flickr photos can't figure out how to navigate or download full-resolution. (That's mostly other parents.)

Leaving Flickr pro does mean losing letting other people download full-resolution of my photos, but I can only think of a handful of photos where that impacts me. I can upload those other places for free. It does mean only seeing my last 200 photos in my photostream, but apparently all my photos already added to groups will remain visible in the group pools. There's some other pro benefits like number of sets, set size, video length, etc. that I don't think will bother me at all.

I think they're in a tough spot of giving too much to free users and not enough benefit to Pro users. I can't argue with their price though. I've considered dropping pro before but $29 for the year is an easy payment to make. The last two years I've just shrugged and payed it rather than deal with it.

Re: What if Flickr fails?

#32

Post by paraschopra »

ghshephard wrote: post #7

Just use Flickr with the presumption that the service is transitory, and will eventually go out out of business - hopefully with advance notice, but possibly not. Treat services like flickr, myspace, facebook as useful, but not guaranteed, CDNs for sharing your images with your social network. But transitory - their is every possibility they will decline and disappear. All the Flickr Pro users I know have a pretty we…

Perhaps someone needs to come up with a startup that treats S3 as storage medium for images, while retaining all the features of Flickr. Then you will truly own your images and not have to worry about company going out of business.

Re: What if Flickr fails?

#33

Post by steveplace »

ghshephard wrote: post #7

Just use Flickr with the presumption that the service is transitory, and will eventually go out out of business - hopefully with advance notice, but possibly not. Treat services like flickr, myspace, facebook as useful, but not guaranteed, CDNs for sharing your images with your social network. But transitory - their is every possibility they will decline and disappear. All the Flickr Pro users I know have a pretty we…

As noone's mentioned this, backupify is a pretty good service that solves this problem. Of course it could also be a transitory CDN, but that goes a little to far down the rabbit hole for me.

Re: What if Flickr fails?

#34

Post by brlewis »

ja27 wrote: post #16

I've paid for a Flickr pro account for a few years now. Ironically, I first got on Flickr when Yahoo Photos shut down and they forcefully migrated me to Flickr. But I'm letting my pro account expire this month. I've been using Flickr for 2 main purposes: sharing photos with friends and backing up all my photos. It hasn't been great for either. No matter how many guest passes and invites I mail friends, most of them o…

My photo site, OurDoings, offers two solutions to your "friends don't look at photos I mail" problem. First, you can send in seconds an email message in html with thumbnails of all your new photos. They don't have to leave their email to see if interesting (to them) photos are part of this update. Second, you can in one click create an album on Facebook for a given month and send that month's photos to it. The album has a link back to the month page on OurDoings where they can see the photos in a nicer format if they so choose.

http://ourdoings.com/

Re: What if Flickr fails?

#35

Post by eftpotrm »

thwarted wrote: post #23
ja27 wrote: post #16

I've paid for a Flickr pro account for a few years now. Ironically, I first got on Flickr when Yahoo Photos shut down and they forcefully migrated me to Flickr. But I'm letting my pro account expire this month. I've been using Flickr for 2 main purposes: sharing photos with friends and backing up all my photos. It hasn't been great for either. No matter how many guest passes and invites I mail friends, most of them o…

Facebook keeps improving their photo service - removing album limits, increasing resolution. Flickr both doesn't limit how many photos can be in a set or collection and provides the original resolution (at least for the pro account, I don't remember what the free account's limits are). These "improvements" Facebook is making is just catching up to flickr's base functionality. Obviously, Facebook may be more compellin…

My (non-photography) friends look more at my photos on Facebook they're where I get the majority of personal feedback.

Flickr is a much better source for me of reference material and examples when I'm looking for inspiration on how to approach a subject - not as a straight copy but to stop me ever further refining my old work. It's also overwhelmingly where I get unsolicited usage enquiries from - got one yesterday as it happens.

If what you want is social sharing with your pre-existing network, I agree - use Facebook. I do. If you want a service more geared for photographers, Flickr is better IMHO.

Re: What if Flickr fails?

#36

Post by hopeless »

"If you value your online photos, pay for the hosting and they'll still be around next year"

That's been Smugmug's matra for years and I truely believe it, which is why I've been hosting my photos there for about 4 years now. I was burned by the closure of other free online galleries back in the early 2000's.

It's also helped to shape my strategy when choosing other online services: if it's important to me and you won't take money for it, I'll assume you'll be dead soon and avoid your service altogether (the exception is Gmail).

Re: What if Flickr fails?

#37

Post by PaulHoule »

I'm not so pessimistic about advertising, but I am pessimistic about Yahoo's stewardship of Flickr. After all, Yahoo deep-sixed geocities, and would have turned off delicious if they'd been able to get away with it.

Re: What if Flickr fails?

#38

Post by derobert »

hopeless wrote: post #36

"If you value your online photos, pay for the hosting and they'll still be around next year" That's been Smugmug's matra for years and I truely believe it, which is why I've been hosting my photos there for about 4 years now. I was burned by the closure of other free online galleries back in the early 2000's. It's also helped to shape my strategy when choosing other online services: if it's important to me and you wo…

Google will happily take your money: https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage
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