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Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

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11–20 of 163 posts

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#11

This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme. 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. So…

I signed up in 2004. It was part of a wave of hot new platforms, all of which it seems Yahoo! was acquiring (except YouTube, which went to Google). We used it at work as well (political consultancy) to host photos for applications, making great use of their excellent API. The idea of getting your photos back out again via a sane API with multiple sizes including thumbnails handled for you was pretty wild.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#12
This is less a pro-Flickr than an anti-Insta but I absolutely refuse to sign up for the latter

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

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#13
I was a Flickr member for many years. It was the only photo sharing website that emphasized the art of photography and also felt like a real community where I actually made connections with and discovered like minded photographers. The focus was on the photography and it didn't play games to keep me locked into the platform (cough Instagram)

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..

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#15

This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme. 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. So…

I signed up in 2004. It was part of a wave of hot new platforms, all of which it seems Yahoo! was acquiring (except YouTube, which went to Google). We used it at work as well (political consultancy) to host photos for applications, making great use of their excellent API. The idea of getting your photos back out again via a sane API with multiple sizes including thumbnails handled for you was pretty wild.

Yes, API was the other best thing about Flickr. A friend made his fortune, especially during the exodus days of Flickr. He traveled around the world photographing some of the best pictures I have seen in my life. He retired pretty early in the Himalayas (he is originally from there).

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...

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#18
post #13

I was a Flickr member for many years. It was the only photo sharing website that emphasized the art of photography and also felt like a real community where I actually made connections with and discovered like minded photographers. The focus was on the photography and it didn't play games to keep me locked into the platform ( cough Instagram) Nowadays, I have a locally hosted Immich instance. It's great as personal p…

[flagged]

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#19
post #13

I was a Flickr member for many years. It was the only photo sharing website that emphasized the art of photography and also felt like a real community where I actually made connections with and discovered like minded photographers. The focus was on the photography and it didn't play games to keep me locked into the platform ( cough Instagram) Nowadays, I have a locally hosted Immich instance. It's great as personal p…

[flagged]

How hard is it to understand "I want to share what Ive done, but I dont want predatory companies taking my work, profiting on it, and offering absolutely nothing in return."

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#20

What, no shade on photobucket? Single handedly created a lot of issues for anyone maintaining old cars…

oh man, I haven't heard of photobucket in years! A great place for those nostalgics of the old web, especially if you used forums. Photobucket was THE srvice to upload images to post on forums, including the "famous" signatures, gifs, etc.
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