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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

#151
post #149
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).…

> Flickr was the coolest thing Yahoo had From my point of view Yahoo destroyed Flickr. I was a happy user for many years and lost access to my photos due to authentication changes. At least Google had the decency to just shut down Reader as opposed to Yahoo's enshittification of a product that sparked joy.

Strong agree that Flickr went downhill rapidly when acquired by Yahoo - but also happy to report that it has since bounced back.

The community isn’t the same of course, but the platform itself is a joy to use again - especially as someone who got tired of Instagram when it stopped being about photography.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#152
post #86

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…

> This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme. Elrond?

Yes, correct. Elrond reminded Gandalf. I remembered Gandalf better.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#153
post #94

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.

Furtrack seems to suffer from the same problem a lot of photo sharing sites do: the only people who visit are the subjects and other photographers. For example: https://www.furtrack.com/index/species:fennec_fox Tens, hundreds of photos for each suit, but almost no views.

I do wish they added some more interesting viewing modes. But their primary goal has been to link photographers with fursuiters, often people who don't know each other or have contact details. A huge improvement over having to dig through google drive folders and personal websites for your photos.

Sadly social media has very much taken over for casual viewing.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#154
post #62
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).…

I have been going back some times to flickr and dropped insta, since it’s a crap place these days (like most of the big socials) The elegance of flickr is just nice and browsing is fun. I wonder if there are more sites like it.

Saw some other folks starting to use https://glass.photo

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We rely on self- and community-moderation. As long as content is flagged appropriately, we allow and embrace content that's often banned on other platforms, such as artistic nudes. Not everything is allowed, though - here's the list: https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/20529310987796-... We do have real, human, in-house customer support. It's good and fast.

That list is super reasonable, FWIW. No hate speech, no Nazis, no pornography, no weird screenshots, no spam. Nothing surprised me, basically what I’d expect.

Thanks! We think so. :)

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#157
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

It will end up distilled into open-weights models.

Not if the big labs have anything to say about it! They're working to fix the 'problem', and with Mythos we no longer have any guarantees that the frontier will even be available to distill.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whats the current censorship level? I seem to recall a buyout and some kind of 'certain things are no longer allowed' changes. Similar thing happened with tumblr, then they semi-reversed a little but not a lot I think. Stopped using both because losing content and accounts with no customer support is the internet way apparently.

We rely on self- and community-moderation. As long as content is flagged appropriately, we allow and embrace content that's often banned on other platforms, such as artistic nudes. Not everything is allowed, though - here's the list: https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/20529310987796-... We do have real, human, in-house customer support. It's good and fast.

When an account is banned does support offer an export?

My experience with similar 'some things are okay, we know it when we see it' - is that support is extremely hostile if it responds (vimeo) .. non-existant if you are banned (google, meta / facebook)

and most often "sorry everything is deleted, your content, friends list, messages - all gone." (all of the above including tumblr)

So yeah, building content and friend's lists on other people's farmland is a thing of the past. with censorship that costs you friends and data people are better off self hosting and doing the fediverse thing, or going to places that explicitly allow almost all explicit things.

There was a time when flickr was very cool for sharing and making friends with people in niches that was to hard find in many places, same with tumblr and it was ruined in a similar way.

It's fine, and I completely understand, it's just not what it once was. Many things are not.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#159
post #84

I still pay for Flickr Pro, for a couple of reasons: the API still works, and I basically use it as a DAM for my wife's website. She's a composer, and it's super handy to have her upload into a Flickr Album and pull back different image sizes for her catalog. Secondly, it makes use of and exposes EXIF data. I really, really lament the Instagrammification of online photography, where the only aspect ration was 1:1, te…

EXIF data enabled some pretty cool things, like PhotoSynth [1]. This stuff looks futuristic even now, ~20 years later, basically what the Metaverse could/should have been. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...

Pretty sure we can fuse those photos together into a gaussian splat and roam around freely in 3D space now, rather than just have the rectangular photos pop up, but it's still very cool tech. I remember when that came out.
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