51–60 of 224 posts
I don't fully remember the details, but my understanding is that the thing that most hurt Flickr was internal Yahoo politics around mobile apps. The Flickr team were understandably very keen to get a great mobile app released - but Yahoo had a separate division (I think called "Connected Life") which had the internal monopoly on mobile development - and the Flickr team weren't allowed to release their own application…
- Ads injected when clicking through photos of a gallery in carousel mode
- Slow page loads
- Pages seem to have their own discrete loading system (some redundant web app nonsense) that often hangs indefinitely until the page is refreshed at which point it loads in ~2 seconds flat
- Very limited ability to search and filter gallery content (in order to see most-liked photos, one must search the site by user then select "sort by: interesting" from an almost hidden menu, but even then it's somewhat randomly sorted by like count
- One must open the inspector to get the raw image url: if I can't simply right-click > save as... images from your website, kindly go fuck yourself; it takes extra effort to undo this feature which is default to all browsers new and old
However I LOVE that they continue to paginate galleries instead of implementing infinite scrolling which is something I hate most about modern web design. Kudos to them for that.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/smugmug-acquires-flickr
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
There was a mad scramble of script writing to get all your originals downloaded before the magic cutoff date (I have some laying around somewhere), it was one of my first interactions with python if i recall correctly. People such as myself were naive and had only Flickr storing all our originals - this was our storage method.
It was at that point we all moved on to whatever else having had the scare of using the service in our minds, leaving the friends who had Pro accounts (you could gift them to people back then, it was neat) stranded without an audience. Probably Instagram, back in the beginning IG prided themselves on iPhone-only high quality (no web, no Android) which was sort of the what Flickr Pro users were using anyways.
Well basically if you are going to make people pay for a photo storage website with a good visualization but somewhat shitty upload system they are just going to flee to a "general file storage" cloud for the same price with a 'slightly shittier' way of viewing them, such as drive or onedrive. (Especially if you threaten to delete already existing photos) Source: i moved to onerive in 2019
I just took a look at Onedrive. 1TB for $60/year. Flickr is unlimited for $72/yr, and has an API and other conveniences specialized to images. > onedrive
And its not only images. Images are 20% of my cloud only
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't sound like a successful or even self-sustaining online community though: > In 2019, SmugMug started deleting Flickr images of free users, except for the newest 1,000 and Creative Commons images. > User Frank Michel estimated that the site had lost 63% of its images as a result. In 2020, SmugMug increased the fee for a Pro account to $60 per year, saying that the site was still losing money. > It would appear…
- reduce freeloading - increase price for paid accounts - focus on serving paid customers > un-sustainable — the orange website
Flickr is great. With a modest yearly fee I get unlimited storage to back up all my pictures. With one click I can generate a URL for any album to share it. Phone pictures are backed up automatically: I take a picture, it gets copied to Flickr. I’m not sure I understand the article. I don’t see the fact that Flickr is not Instagram to be a disadvantage. The UI is bad and always was bad. But it’s easy to upload a whol…
I used to use Flickr, but iCloud storage is cheaper and more convenient.
Does iCloud have an API for interacting with your images?
Used Flickr for years. Then Yahoo came along. Then the T&C's changed, transferring ownership of the photos to Flickr, not even attributing the photographers. Then they introduced fees. I've not uploaded anything since Yahoo bought them.
The Yahoo login thing killed me. But I did like the idea of "flickr: photo sharing for people who have Yahoo.com email addresses"