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Whatever happened to Flickr?

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Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#101

Post by PaulHoule »

For me photography has been an on and off sort of thing.

I went through a phase prior to 2010 when I was serious about Flickr.

I tried to get back into it but the user interface seemed unacceptably slow on a DSL connection and it wasn't just that "big photos" were involved but some wider kind of bloat.

I got into the "photo sharing" business with my own sites that burned out spectacularly and left me paying AWS bills out of my home equity line of credit. I know a lot of people who crashed and burned with photo sites in that time frame, the real survivors were instagram, snapchat, and pinterest.

I had most of my lenses go bad and was down to just a 20mm prime on my Canon body. I lost interest in photography and when I got it back I couldn't find the body so I thought long and hard before jumping into the Sony mirrorless ecosystem. I got a number of quality zoom lenses, but never got my psychology around taking photographs seriously.

18 months ago I got a "free" inkjet printer and challenged myself to print something every day to keep things drying out. Since then it has been a voyage of discovery more than invention and I progressed from anime fan art to art reproductions to photographs I take myself. The central concept is the "three sided card" which is a physical object that has a "digital twin" on the web. My work is driven by the needs of the system and I've been drawn kicking and screaming into taking pictures again, including all of the subjects I couldn't somehow make myself do.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#102

Post by simonw »

ghaff wrote: post #96
simonw wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flickr was a mass market social network back in ~2007 if you squint at it in the right way.

You'd have to squint very very hard. Certainly lots of people who used Flickr for free online photo storage are on Instagram today. But the social network aspect of Flickr was always pretty focused on the prosumer and, perhaps to a lesser degree, pro base who were willing to pay an annual fee. It's not clear to me that Flickr (and now Flickr/Smugmug) could have co-existed on the same service as Instagram. So the Flic…

Flickr had a follow button, and everything revolved around the stream of photos taken by your friends and family.

There was even a song written about it! http://rolandtanglao.com/2005/02/12/i-love-my-flickr-friends...

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#103

Post by mullingitover »

Hah. Whatever happened to Instagram?

After all this time, money, and engineering talent, they lack basic features like "Give me a URL to all the photos I (or any user) have tagged with X" that flickr has pretty much had since the neolithic era. Instagram is still basically a toy app that was lucky enough not to be mismanaged to death. Current flickr management has done what they can, but as a product flickr missed out because Yahoo never met a good idea that they didn't fail to execute on.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#104

Post by dpark »

Jenk wrote: post #7

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.

> transferring ownership of the photos to Flickr, not even attributing the photographers

I would love to know what you’re talking about here.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#105

Post by myko »

mullingitover wrote: post #103

Hah. Whatever happened to Instagram? After all this time, money, and engineering talent, they lack basic features like "Give me a URL to all the photos I (or any user) have tagged with X" that flickr has pretty much had since the neolithic era. Instagram is still basically a toy app that was lucky enough not to be mismanaged to death. Current flickr management has done what they can, but as a product flickr missed ou…

Instagram still doesn't have an iPad app

Bizarre considering they have some of the finest iOS developers in the world

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#106

Post by myko »

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.

> uncompressed/original files

Even with the paid plan? I'm pretty sure I selected an "originals" option in Google Photos - do they not actually use the originals?

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#107

Post by axiosgunnar »

myko wrote: post #105
mullingitover wrote: post #103

Hah. Whatever happened to Instagram? After all this time, money, and engineering talent, they lack basic features like "Give me a URL to all the photos I (or any user) have tagged with X" that flickr has pretty much had since the neolithic era. Instagram is still basically a toy app that was lucky enough not to be mismanaged to death. Current flickr management has done what they can, but as a product flickr missed ou…

Instagram still doesn't have an iPad app Bizarre considering they have some of the finest iOS developers in the world

Talk about razor sharp focus. Maybe that‘s why they‘re worth billions?

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#108

Post by LeonidasXIV »

I am a paying Flickr customer but only begrudgingly so. Part of it is that Flickr lives in a somewhat weird no-mans land where it is bad for photographers but also bad for casual users.

As a casual user to drop my photos anywhere Google Photos is just so much better. It identifies people and things pretty well, the upload is extremely well integrated into my phone and it is absolutely a no-brainer to have stuff there. Flickr's Android app is slow and clunky, for many years it was extremely bad at actually loading images (taking forever) and is missing all the features.

As a pro-user it is missing customizability that I could have a "professional profile" and it seems all the good and useful organizational features are in a different UI that's legacy and hasn't been updated ever since I started using the site (no new UI but also zero new features).

The whole "deleting photos" thing is also quite bad. While I obviously understand that SmugMug had to pull the rug because they can't bleed money like Yahoo was obviously doing it just left a bad taste in my mouth and the improvements that they did is mostly "look we made a movie". Which is fine and all and there's space for that for sure but maybe also improve the site?

I would like to like Flickr much more than I do. It feels like it had so much potential and a good community but now it is entirely a ghost town where you post to groups only to have comments show up saying "seen in group XYZ". There's still some extremely good photography on Flickr and it is not quite overrun my trends as Instagram seems to be but ehhh, I just wish it wouldn't be so unpleasant.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#109

Post by derefr »

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…

It's a self-sustaining online community of paid users. Like an MMO. Who cares about free users?

Unlike in a social network, free use of Flickr is not the point of Flickr. It's just a free-tier teaser to get you to understand the site, get used to it, and then start paying once you want to use it for anything "real." Like the free tier of e.g. Dropbox.

Re: Whatever happened to Flickr?

#110

Post by dpark »

glenstein wrote: post #87
ksec wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often think Marissa Mayer would have been great as COO. Not so much as a CEO or Product Designer. I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google. In some sense it wasn't just Marissa, it was also the board's fault.

>I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google. This is exactly right, and it perfectly highlights the dilemma of Yahoo that made it an unwinnable battle. "Being a media company" would have been a real answer, and a real decision that g…

I find it really strange that Mayer gets the blame for Yahoo’s decline. Yahoo was racing downhill before Mayer was even considered for the CEO role there. I am doubtful anyone could have reversed Yahoo’s fortune. At least when Steve Jobs showed up to save Apple they had a core competency. Frankly Yahoo didn’t.

Yahoo failed to capitalize on search until Google was entrenched. They failed to invest properly in targeted advertising until Google owned that as well. They sat on strategic investments like Flickr until they were nearly dead. They could have sold to Ballmer’s Microsoft for an unjustifiable fortune and somehow they fucked that up, too. They could have bought Google for change and said no.

Yahoo lucked into success. It was literally started as a list of links. They realized people would pay a fortune for banner ads and raked in money hand over first until competent competitors appeared. They started Yahoo Mail which was a great idea but then made it feel low quality by sticking ads in outgoing email and then again just let it sit and rot. They bought a corporate mail app and then just sat on it, too. They didn’t even use it internally. Yahoo managed to treat every market opportunity the way Microsoft treated the post-iPhone mobile market.

I worked at Yahoo during part of this decline. The frustrating thing was that Yahoo couldn’t decide what they were. They kept calling themselves a media company but that didn’t seem to mean anything. They didn’t have a plan to really grow their media presence and they were investing crazy in rebuilding an ad system that they couldn’t convince people to switch to.

When Mayer came on board, lots of people (online at least) claimed that her real job was just to find an acquirer. That might not be far from the truth.

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