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Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

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Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#31

Post by jimwalsh »

potatolicious wrote: post #10
troymc wrote: post #7

"Either way, there is currently a gaping void on the Web for people to share higher-resolution beautiful photos." 500px seems to do that quite well. http://500px.com/

Ehh... I disagree somewhat. 500px is another beast entirely, with its own (huge) set of problems. As an avid photographer myself I can't really get behind it. To summarize a large argument: 500px has an extremely strong groupthink, leading to a very confined set of photos that its community prefers. It is much stronger than any other photo site I've come across, including Flickr. Its notion of beauty is very firmly i…

You can post anything in Flickr, and there's a group for anything and that's part of the problem. The community used to be good there, but the community of Flickr just turns into a giant circlejerk of 'I liked your like mine back!' posts. Flickr's community devolved ages ago and with that all but the diehards stayed. I still can't see why people would return given all the other, better, options out there now.

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#32

Post by dmd »

jmathai wrote: post #2

Absolutely not. The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered. They aren't going to out engineer or out pace any smaller competitor. Basically, the only thing they have is gone and is going to be very hard to get back. In Internet speak they abused their community by abandoning them for years. By "they" I mean the bureaucracy I came to know so well while at Yahoo!. And no,…

The other thing Flickr has going for it is they're still the ONLY one out there that has decent support for metadata. I've tried Smugmug, I've tried OpenPhoto, I've tried Gallery (v2 and v3), and Flickr is still the only one that seems to understand concepts like (for instance) "the tag 'Joe Schmo' should not be displayed or (god forbid) SAVED as 'joeschmo'".

And nobody but Flickr has the (really, really great) Guest Pass feature, where you can share private photos with people WITHOUT forcing them to sign up for something.

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#33

Post by pauldbourke »

joonix wrote: post #16

>Could Flickr create a beautiful magazinelike iPad application that allows people to skim through high-resolution images on the service? How does this Flickr app not already exist? I'm pretty sure a couple of 20yr old coders could make an app like this in a day or two if they had access to Flickr's data. The hard part isn't displaying images on a tablet, its having the high quality images in the first place.

Here you go: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bourke.gli... (though Android not iOS)

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#34

Post by buro9 »

potatolicious wrote: post #11

Speaking from the perspective of the photography-enthusiast category, I've been coming to the conclusion that Google+ may become the next Flickr. It has first-class communications features that Flickr has always sorely needed. Commenting isn't a tiny box at the bottom with awful pagination, you can upvote posts as well as comments, and it has group sharing capabilities well beyond "add to pool". The photo upload proc…

I almost agreed... then I moved from Windows to Ubuntu and the lack of Picasa blew all value clean out of the water as the basic syncing, permissioning and tagging became unnecessarily difficult.

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#35

Post by jmathai »

dmd wrote: post #32
jmathai wrote: post #2

Absolutely not. The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered. They aren't going to out engineer or out pace any smaller competitor. Basically, the only thing they have is gone and is going to be very hard to get back. In Internet speak they abused their community by abandoning them for years. By "they" I mean the bureaucracy I came to know so well while at Yahoo!. And no,…

The other thing Flickr has going for it is they're still the ONLY one out there that has decent support for metadata. I've tried Smugmug, I've tried OpenPhoto, I've tried Gallery (v2 and v3), and Flickr is still the only one that seems to understand concepts like (for instance) "the tag 'Joe Schmo' should not be displayed or (god forbid) SAVED as 'joeschmo'". And nobody but Flickr has the (really, really great) Guest…

There's even more features that Flickr is the only service to have. They're ahead in many areas but the speed at which they've been adding new features is significantly slower than others.

It's just a matter of time before other services replicate the features Flickr has today which are valuable. Remember, they've been around for 8 or so years. It takes time to get to where they are today. But 8 years from now, it won't be Flickr we're talking about.

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#36

Post by newishuser »

Paying flickr user here. Flickr is perfect and that's it's problem. I don't need social integration, I don't need filters, I don't need multi-platform sharing. I need an automatic resizer and reliable CDN and flickr is a remarkable both of those.

Flickr is not dead nor is it on life support, it's just not interesting. But just because something's not interesting doesn't mean it's not exceptionally useful. Flickr's search is best in show, it's CDN is always fast and reliable and API is comprehensive.

A massive user-base and obnoxious valuation don't make something important, sometimes just being useful, even if underutilized, is good enough.

edit: it also contains many amazing collections that are easily browsable, searchable, and aren't under threat of disappearing from the internet 'cos of a passing fad.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/sets/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/sets/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives/sets/

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#37

Post by lancefisher »

bad_user wrote: post #19
lancefisher wrote: post #15

"People loved — I mean loved! – Flickr" This is true for me. Flickr was the first web service I paid for, and I still do. It really was a generational leap at the time. Photos were meant to be shared, and they nailed it. Tagging and tag clouds, folksonomy, embeddable badges - these were all fresh back then and they worked well. If only they would have added the ability to tag friends early on, I think it could have t…

I used to backup my photos on Flickr, but Flickr is awful for backups. You can't upload lengthy videos, you can't backup your raw files, retrieving your whole collection back from Flickr is extremely painful, etc... So recently I'm switching to Google Drive for my backup needs.

I use it as a backup, and catalog. I still have my photos on my hard drive, but I know if it dies they'll be on flickr still. This was more important to me before I had dropbox.

Flickr also serves as a great cataloging tool. It's quicker for me to find a photo by tag on flickr than to find it locally.

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#38

Post by jmathai »

justincormack wrote: post #26
bigiain wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered." It's also got the inertia of it's existing userbase - each year my renewal comes up, and I think "Do I _really_ want to pay for this again?", then I think "But is it worth saving $25 but having to move all the photos I have up here, and deal with having links to them break?" and I just pay up again. One day, I suspect I'll st…

My subscription just expired and I can't decide what to do... Last year I gave them one more chance. I guess they have shipped something, although I use Android...

Drop %6.95 to renew your membership for 3 months. Just enough time to export them all to OpenPhoto :). https://openphoto.me

Re: Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

#39

Post by bigiain »

jmathai wrote: post #38
justincormack wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My subscription just expired and I can't decide what to do... Last year I gave them one more chance. I guess they have shipped something, although I use Android...

Drop %6.95 to renew your membership for 3 months. Just enough time to export them all to OpenPhoto :). https://openphoto.me

I've got an openphoto account. The friction I feel each subscription time is all the places out there on the internet that are linking to my Flickr pictures with the Flickr urls. It's worth ~$25/yr to not even consider going and finding all the places I've got pictures linked out of my Flickr account and working out how to update them (if it's even possible). I could very easily store all my own photos in S3, but I can't easily go back and update old urls, and hey - $25 isn't _that_ much…
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