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Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

petapixel.com

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Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#101

Post by onethumb »

Nrbelex wrote: post #57
onethumb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just finished reading. Glad they captured what we're doing - photography & community - and what we're not - algorithmic feeds & privacy violations. We have lots of work to do, and I think most of the criticisms are fair and on our road map. Small team, working hard, listening to customers. Like we've been doing for 24 years. (We're bootstrapped and privately owned, never taken VC). AMA.

Author here. Glad this made its way to you. I've been chatting with Shay and don't have a ton of questions, but I'd just emphasize that even as Flickr continues to (rightfully!) modernize, please (a) don't drop the features that make it different than the closed social media platforms (e.g., RSS, open APIs, etc.) and (b) maintain and enhance the power features that make Flickr more than just a place to dump photos (e…

I'm too big of a nerd to let the RSS feeds, open APIs, etc go. :)

Alas, Flickr wouldn't even be alive if we hadn't increased the price ($$) and value (features) of Pro relative to things like intrusive ads on free accounts, etc. The very reason it's alive is because we have intrusive ads on free accounts, but no ads on Pro accounts, including for viewers. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.

We have some great plans to further increase Pro's value, but we disagree that Pro is too expensive. Relative to our peers, it's a bargain for unlimited storage, advertising free, etc etc.

Love to bounce future ideas off of you, and thanks for the article!

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#102

Post by Tomte »

ymolodtsov wrote: post #93

In the last few years I've tried multiple photo hosting options. 500px, Flickr, Unsplash. In the end, I just built my own photo blog on Hugo with SveltiaCMS (thanks Claude). I don't care much about the social part per se, just want a place to host my photo journeys.

For a simple static "here are my photos", I‘ve found https://github.com/bep/gallerydeluxe today, and really like the focus on photos, not UI and thingies flying in and out of the viewport all the time.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#103

Post by Tomte »

onethumb wrote: post #101
Nrbelex wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Glad this made its way to you. I've been chatting with Shay and don't have a ton of questions, but I'd just emphasize that even as Flickr continues to (rightfully!) modernize, please (a) don't drop the features that make it different than the closed social media platforms (e.g., RSS, open APIs, etc.) and (b) maintain and enhance the power features that make Flickr more than just a place to dump photos (e…

I'm too big of a nerd to let the RSS feeds, open APIs, etc go. :) Alas, Flickr wouldn't even be alive if we hadn't increased the price ($$) and value (features) of Pro relative to things like intrusive ads on free accounts, etc. The very reason it's alive is because we have intrusive ads on free accounts, but no ads on Pro accounts, including for viewers. I don't expect that to change anytime soon. We have some great…

Is HEIC/HEIF support somewhere on the roadmap? I know people have been asking for years and you don‘t want to be a backup site, but display photos. But this whole conversion thing makes me uncomfortable anyway.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#104

Post by mystraline »

GaryBluto wrote: post #85
overfeed wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biological humans are not, and should not be equivalent to corporations. There's a chasm in scale of execution, goals, and functional immortality. Further case law established that I - a human - can create original work, if you are a non-human entity such as an LLM, or a monkey taking a picture, you cannot.

Remind me again what beings operate corporations.

A company is a ship of Theses. Someone can die, and theyre replaced within 3 days. A new hire takes their place within a month (or used to). And legally, the comapny's sole responsibility is "make money for shareholders".

An analysis of 'what a company is', is fair to compare it to the most laser-focused sociopath.

But your false point is trying to say 'Since humans run a company, its human ethics and just humans'. And what we have is demonstrably not human-like.

The 2003 documentary film 'The Corporation' does a deep dive as why you are wrong, in regards to falsely equivocating humans to a corporation. The worst of the worst behaviors of sociopathic humans get selected more and more, all in the name of money.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6v8e7dUwq_Q

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#105

Post by Nrbelex »

onethumb wrote: post #101
Nrbelex wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Glad this made its way to you. I've been chatting with Shay and don't have a ton of questions, but I'd just emphasize that even as Flickr continues to (rightfully!) modernize, please (a) don't drop the features that make it different than the closed social media platforms (e.g., RSS, open APIs, etc.) and (b) maintain and enhance the power features that make Flickr more than just a place to dump photos (e…

I'm too big of a nerd to let the RSS feeds, open APIs, etc go. :) Alas, Flickr wouldn't even be alive if we hadn't increased the price ($$) and value (features) of Pro relative to things like intrusive ads on free accounts, etc. The very reason it's alive is because we have intrusive ads on free accounts, but no ads on Pro accounts, including for viewers. I don't expect that to change anytime soon. We have some great…

I actually think we agree that the value proposition is currently there for pro, per what I laid out in the piece (though of course I look forward to things that will further increase its value). My comment was supposed to make clear that adding more ads to Pro could undermine that value—but it sounds like that's not the plan, which is great.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#106

Post by ghaff »

disce-pati wrote: post #83
abhinav061 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

> a couple of them landed on Wikipedia because of that - felt nice. as someone who goes down many rabbit holes on wikipedia, i appreciate this comment and all of those CC photos

When I was doing more graphics-rich presentations, the CC photo resource on Flickr was really useful. (In case someone asks, I usually wasn't being paid directly for giving presentations so I convinced myself I could feel comfortable using CC content in general even with strings like non-commercial attached.)

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#107

Post by johannes1234321 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #36
GaryBluto wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I agree. Back in the day hackers were for the free enablement and usage of all data, code and media included. Now it seems everyone has turned into copyright hawks which ironically only entrench big players via regulatory capture so say goodbye to actual open source AI models, they're too poor to license content while big tech companies can.

The mantra, at least in German hacker scene, is: "use public data, protect private data"

Published data is somewhere in the middle. But open source movement was always around copyright. FSF uses Copyright in Form of "copyleft" GPL for their agenda as does more business focussed open source movement. They are all purposely not using "public domain"

Yes, there is also the pirating scene, "opening" up works and pushing copyright law, but only few advocate complete abolishment of copyright.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#108

Post by ghaff »

reaperducer wrote: post #77
komali2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright protected you against your work being used in ways you did not agree to. Is this true? Remember that Harlan Ellison plagiarism case, the nightmare he went through to get a payout? It seems the vast majority of times, when a corporation decides it wants to use something you created, it gets to just do so because it has more capital than you.

Is this true? Yes, it is. I'm a previous career, I was a professional photographer. I spent a lot of time chasing after companies that operated with the "if it's in the internet, it must be free" mindset. The right letters, sent the right way, to the right people almost always gets things fixed. In one example, a very major bank used one of my photos as the cover of a corporate report. That mistake paid my rent for a…

Most major corporations are not stupid enough to do that though, and if they do, their lawyers will tell them to just settle and the responsible person (or a scapegoat) will quietly move on. Far more likely it's some random blogger or low-rent publication grabbing stuff off the Internet.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#109

Post by ghaff »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #107
satvikpendem wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Back in the day hackers were for the free enablement and usage of all data, code and media included. Now it seems everyone has turned into copyright hawks which ironically only entrench big players via regulatory capture so say goodbye to actual open source AI models, they're too poor to license content while big tech companies can.

The mantra, at least in German hacker scene, is: "use public data, protect private data" Published data is somewhere in the middle. But open source movement was always around copyright. FSF uses Copyright in Form of "copyleft" GPL for their agenda as does more business focussed open source movement. They are all purposely not using "public domain" Yes, there is also the pirating scene, "opening" up works and pushing…

There are also potential legal issues with public domain, especially in Europe where some rights can't always be disclaimed. There are OSI open source public domain licenses like the MIT-0 license.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#110

Post by dawolf- »

onethumb wrote: post #40
Eiriksmal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I asked Nathan B all of my important Flickr-post-your-aquistion questions at a 7CTOs event way back in 2019, but that was a lifetime ago. Do you make enough money off my Flickr Pro subscription to keep it going indefinitely? I'd rather pay you then funnel more cash to AWS or Google for cloud backups, but I'm not a professional photographer, so the actual SmugMug products aren't valuable for me and there's alw…

Yes. Flickr was losing a ton of money (>$50M/year) when we bought it, and it's now cash flow positive and profitable. Not by a lot, alas, but the difference between $1 and $0 or less is the difference between life and death. Flickr is alive! As I think the article captured pretty well, we could make a lot more money if we went the algorithmic-privacy-violating route, but we don't want to. So we aren't. Since we never…

Good to hear. Still happily paying for Pro every year and using the API to pull images into my website.
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