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Whatever happened to Flickr?

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Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#61

Post by grumblepeet »

Did you know that Flickr actually started out as an online multiplayer game, with file sharing as one if its features. The game flopped, but the file sharing bit was redeveloped into Flickr. Some of the files used to have .GNE in their url's, with GNE standing for 'Game Never Ending' which was the same of the game. See https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending for reference.

Looks like the game is going to be ending soon though...just remembered I'm a paid member, better go cancel that.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#62

Post by leephillips »

mam4 wrote: post #57
leephillips wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

6T for 99 dollars with family pack. More than necessary And its not only images. Images are 20% of my cloud only

So you agree that “same price” is incorrect. But, true of course, Flickr is just for photographs.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#64

Post by [deleted] »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #37
ComputerGuru wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing that happened to JC Penney (Ron Johnson). Buying a big name that was lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time with the right idea for the right company doesn't mean you magically get their success.

JC Penney was on its way out, or at least in terminal decline. It did not matter who took the helm, the change to online shopping meant there was going to be consolidation as demand for in person shopping went down. Even Macys is struggling, and now they have a part of the store that sells basically non returnable junk, like a dollar store. There is typically only room for 1 or 2 retail businesses now per market segm…

[deleted]

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#65

Post by greyface- »

grumblepeet wrote: post #61

Did you know that Flickr actually started out as an online multiplayer game, with file sharing as one if its features. The game flopped, but the file sharing bit was redeveloped into Flickr. Some of the files used to have .GNE in their url's, with GNE standing for 'Game Never Ending' which was the same of the game. See https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending for reference. Looks like the game is going to be…

Stewart Butterfield, one of the founders, then went on to give the MMO thing another shot, starting one called Glitch in 2009. In 2012, it was deemed unprofitable, and they pivoted, re-developing their internal communication tools into Slack, which was wildly successful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#68

Post by muststopmyths »

ianlevesque wrote: post #28
pythonic_hell wrote: post #3

At the beginning of 2021 I completely move my life away from facebooks ecosystem. As a hobbies photographer I moved from Instagram to Flickr, I wish I had done it earlier! Flickr as a tool is very focused on creators. Once you start using it you realize that the company isn't optimizing for clicks and content consumption. This results in a product and community who’s standard of quality is leagues ahead of anything e…

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…

So, I was really pissed off when they said they'd start deleting pictures instead of hiding them like the old Flickr. I was never going to re-upload all my pictures if I decided to go Pro again in the future. So I thought Flickr was effectively dead to me.

However, in the 2 years since they announced that, all my 6000+ photos were still there.

I never checked to see how many were still publicly visible, though. I wonder if they exposed only the newest 1000 public photos. That might account for the "63% of images lost" stat above.

Finally, this fall I needed a photo-sharing site again and decided I still like Flickr with its shitty "new" UI better than most other sites. I particularly like collections of albums and the maps of photos.

Plus, the overall UI for browsing an album is simple. No annoying sales-catalog style layouts.

I have OneDrive for my camera uploads (habit carried over from Windows Phone) and other private uploads, but anything I want to share publicly will go on Flickr.

They had a pretty good sale on Black Friday, so I ended up signing up for a year.

Still keep backups of my photos locally of course and I am ready to bail if they change it to look like Smugmug :-)

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#69

Post by jcrawfordor »

wott wrote: post #38
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the problem with UX now compared to before?

It used to be well organised grid-ordered thumbnails (regularly displayed even when from different aspect ratios) on a white background that made picture stand out, with titles and descriptions as first citizens. Ipernity ( http://www.ipernity.com/explore/whatshot ) kept more or less that appearance, if you want to see). Then in 2012 or 2013, they 'modernised' it into the current one: glued pictures with almost no se…

I think this gets at an insightful issue - In Flickr's heyday, much of its userbase was professional, aspiring, and amateur photographers who were effectively power users. They viewed Flickr as something like an extension of Lightroom, so they used it for storage but also curated their public profile, lists, etc in a sort of proto-Instagram way.

When Flickr repositioned post Yahoo acquisition, it felt like it was aiming for more of a Google Photos-type use-case that was very passive and "it just works", which felt very different from how it had been popular before. I think history bears out that this was a poor decision, we don't really have major players now that glue those styles of usage together like Flickr did. I think it just required a higher level of effort in both the software and the users, and once Flickr pushed away the audience that enjoyed that level of effort to try to acquire a more set-and-forget audience it lost the first and failed to appeal much to the second.

I think the old core Flickr userbase often went to 500px, which I don't like as much but is closer to Flickr in the good old days.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#70

Post by leephillips »

marwis wrote: post #67
colecut wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google photos is also pretty cheap and convenient.

With Google Photos you can't download uncompressed/original files and exif location tags are always stripped.

Yikes. So it’s just, what—some kind of sharing site? That makes it useless for backup.
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