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Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

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Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#41
post #3
post #2

Lately I've been enjoying photography a lot but Flickr never clicked for me. Instagram nowadays is almost unusable for this as it prioritizes reels too much and 500px... I liked that one more than Flickr. Right now, I'm using glass.photo and I actually quite like it. You have to pay, though, which is a high entrance barrier, but I feel the quality of what I see in the site is great, the platform works nicely and the…

There's also Irys (from Alan Schaller). It's more open than Glass, as it's a freemium model, but it's also more closed at the same time, as it doesn't offer a web-based version. It's probably even more photographer-oriented than Glass. For something truly open, there's Pixelfed. All those platforms have their pros and cons, especially regarding the audience. Personally, I publish all my photos on my own website and s…

>it doesn't offer a web-based version

>It's probably even more photographer-oriented

not even remotely serious? ridiculous

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#42
At the peak of its popularity, Flickr was an interesting glimpse of the coming age of algorithmic homogeneity. In the mid-2010s, most of their top photos looked basically the same: heavily shopped, oversaturated HDR landscapes.

I stopped using Flickr around the time they started flirting with bait-and-switch strategies - "we'll hide / delete your old photos unless you pay" - so maybe things have gotten better... although I see that artificially-looking landscapes still dominate their "trending" page (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags).

Anyway, my general takeaway is that things are more interesting on photo sites where engagement isn't driven primarily by a global popularity ranking. You just come across thought-provoking work more often.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#43
post #7

I've been a pro member for many years, with about 35k photos uploaded. I am grateful that they have never chased the engagement bait. Some people like to complain about the Pro features but I found them to be absolutely fair and I wanna do everything I can to support this platform. All of my photos are automatically synced to Flickr via the Auto uploader, and getting things from my camera to Flickr is as simple as tr…

Can you elaborate on the markdown embed request? In which contexts would you want that?

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#44

Great? I remember that time I reported someone for reposting my images. Flickr's response was deleting my profile, all of my photos, and not responding to any of my attempts to contact them. On the upside, it was a good lesson to not trust service providers.

Doesn't sound like us. When was this?

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#45

SmugMug is pretty great.

Yeah, they should buy Flickr and abandon the whole social media aspect and just turn it into an exact copy of SmugMug, but interleave the pricing tiers.

It would really be crazy if they did that, but they claimed that limiting the number of photos users could upload, instead of limiting the quality, somehow made it more like a social media platform.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#46

Hey, owner & CEO here. Reading this now, but AMA.

Hey, it's Saturday night and I'm on Hacker News woot woot.

I work on climate technology (sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky), and I have a side quest to create a "Freedom to Breathe" mural in Manhattan before the upcoming New York Climate Week. Might be up your alley knowing artists and photographers. How interested are you in working together on making a mural?

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#47
post #38

Flickr was the coolest thing Yahoo had when I worked there (Brickhouse was a close second). I really loved all the places where they snuck in "Game Never Ending" in the product, because they didn't set out to make a photo sharing product, but steered hard into that. Flickr was the only property which was allowed their own version of PHP and despite having PHP inside, every single URL said ".gne" (Game Never Ending).…

+1 on Flickr being the best acquisition and product Yahoo! had.

I still have my account and old photos there. And because I licensed most of them as CC, a couple of them landed on Wikipedia because of that - felt nice.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#48
It's very single purpose, but there's Furtrack for fursuit photography. One of the few sites that leaves photos in full quality rather than compressing them down to 1-2 megapixels.

It's been such a tragedy that we now have such good quality cameras, yet all the media we consume is incredibly downscaled and compressed to save money.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#49
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…

same once i seen my images in the massive data sets, i quit posting my photographs online and just share between friends and family now

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I cannot understand this mindset. People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages. Right? On the one hand there was the mystery of what might happen with your photos and on the other there is the plain, inescapable knowledge that they will be donated to like four dude’s tech companies to make money off of without acknowledgement or compensation. That’s basically…

i guess people who don't create anything can't understand how this feels, the day you check one of those massive image dataset they train on and see all your images... horrible feeling
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