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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

#71

Post by GaryBluto »

overfeed wrote: post #68
GaryBluto wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that if you write a book directly inspired by another you should be required to pay the author of the book that inspired you?

That's a false equivalence. Humans occasionally cause food poisoning at potlucks, and it's self-evident why we should hold McDonald's to a much higher standard due to the sheer scale of harm it can cause. A human, even when hopped up on stimulants, can't do a fraction of what a corporations with whole data centers can do.

It is in no way a false equivalence. Are you saying that if you write a book directly inspired by another you shouldn't be required to pay the author of the book that inspired you, unless you become successful, then you should be held to "higher standards"?

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#72

Post by amatecha »

leviathant wrote: post #55

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…

Yeah the time capsule thing is a big part of its value to me. I will never forget how disappointed I was when the "Macintosh" group disappeared. I think at some point I actually chatted with someone who worked at Flickr and explained that the group owner simply closed it at some point (can't remember 100%). It had so many photos going back to basically the earliest days of Flickr, of all kinds of awesome photos of Mac computers of all eras, not only new digital photos but tons of stuff people posted from prior decades. The other Mac/Apple-related groups were not as comprehensive. That was good while it lasted, at least. I wish there was some way to re-open the group :\

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#73

Post by RobotToaster »

onethumb wrote: post #33

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

Have you considered offering free storage for freely licensed (cc-by & cc-by-sa) works?

I want to share my photos under a free license, but the one thing that always put me off Flickr was that I would have to pay an indefinite subscription to contribute to the commons.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#74

Post by amatecha »

Been using Flickr since 2005, and been paying for Pro since 2015 (it cost $24.95 then). It's still the best photo-sharing community, by far.

Pretty disappointed my Pro subscription somehow increased by 60% this year. That's pretty uncool. I guess all the crippling of free accounts still hasn't reduced costs enough, or something. It's bad enough you can never see original size on free accounts anymore (even though I'm now paying $135/year!), apparently reduction in functionality that was theoretically supposed to keep costs down still hasn't prevented a continual escalation of Pro subscription cost (regardless of my minimal usage of the site).

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#75

Post by amatecha »

alex1138 wrote: post #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

IG was cool when it started, but yeah, its acquisition (and shortly before) was such a swift downhill slide. Haven't even logged into my account in years and years.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#76

Post by overfeed »

GaryBluto wrote: post #71
overfeed wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a false equivalence. Humans occasionally cause food poisoning at potlucks, and it's self-evident why we should hold McDonald's to a much higher standard due to the sheer scale of harm it can cause. A human, even when hopped up on stimulants, can't do a fraction of what a corporations with whole data centers can do.

It is in no way a false equivalence. Are you saying that if you write a book directly inspired by another you shouldn't be required to pay the author of the book that inspired you, unless you become successful, then you should be held to "higher standards"?

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.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#77

Post by reaperducer »

komali2 wrote: post #52
Renaud wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they haven’t. Copyright protected you against your work being used in ways you did not agree to. Enforcement is another things but photographers and artists have had ways to push back against illicit use of their work, notably by larger corporations. Licensing is an industry based on this protection alone. The difference is that now, large corporations with plenty of money are able to just swallow other people’s w…

> 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 little over a year.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#78

Post by eddyzh »

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…

Thank you. This is great to hear!

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#79

Post by thedonncha »

karel-3d wrote: post #61
Brajeshwar wrote: post #9

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…

If you didn't pay recently, they deleted most of your photos anyway. They deleted all but the newest 100 or so for the free accounts

> If you didn't pay recently, they deleted most of your photos anyway. > > They deleted all but the newest 100 or so for the free accounts

The photos are still there. I don't have PRO and my 2772 images can still be seen, even by logged out visitors. I can't upload anything though.

Re: Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

#80

Post by zimpenfish »

sjia wrote: post #66

Instagram didn’t kill Flickr by being better for photographers, but by being better at distribution.

Also the friction of uploading a photo from iOS was (and pretty much still is, despite Instagram's best efforts to enshittify their app) much, much lower for Instagram.

If the Flickr app had had a "quick upload" flow like Instagram, they might have had a chance but (like almost everything Yahoo! did) they fumbled badly and wasted any potential they had.

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