Flickr: The first and last great photo platform
petapixel.comFlickr 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 worked for the PHP team and that was my only excuse to show up to work in the SF office instead of being stuck in Sunnyvale when visiting the US.
They had all the right bits of architecture built out - rest of Yahoo had great code (like vespa or the graph behind Yahoo 360), but everything was more complex than it should be.
Flickr had the simplest possible approach that worked and they tried it before building anything more complex - the image urls, the resize queues, the way albums were stored, machine-tags, gps co-ordinates.
I also took a lot of photos to put up on flickr, trying to get featured on the explore page up front - it was like getting published in a magazine.
Every presentation I made had CC images backed by flickr, it was a true commons to share and take.
And then Instagram happened.
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
+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.
I had everything set as CC until I noticed a photo of my very pregnant wife was getting many more views then anything else and I found it cited in a paper on training AI. That was somehow less endearing then someone getting a good use out of my images (which also happened at least once with one of my images)
> 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.)
I think the thing was that Instagram was snappy, and Flickr (to my strong recollection) was really slow.
I also loved Flickr, and Pipes was a really cool technology too.
It’s cool that they used PHP, I always thought it was RoR platform.
I thought Flickr predated RoR, went to check Wikipedia: it says both were launched in 2004 but Flickr a few months earlier.
I never understood the appeal of instagram over Flicker.
It's dumbed down. In today's world, dumb always wins.
I was trying to think when I stopped browsing and using Flickr. You just reminded me.
> 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.
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. Some even bought the original copy and rights. It was never my intention to sell my photos nor will that ever be but my guestimate is that I sold quite a lot (high single digit thousands of dollars).
I donated and gifted a lot of Pro accounts to people who asked, mostly students and thos who commented nicely on my blog. Many of my payments comes to Paypal and it got accumulated and there were no ways to get the money to India (for a very long time). So, I just used it to gift to others.
Before I stopped using it more than a decade ago. It had garnered over 10+ million views and my tenure with Flickr lasted almost a decade.
I’ve taken backups/takeout but do not have the heart to delete my account yet. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/
I signed up in 2004. It was part of a wave of hot new platforms, all of which it seems Yahoo! was acquiring (except YouTube, which went to Google). We used it at work as well (political consultancy) to host photos for applications, making great use of their excellent API. The idea of getting your photos back out again via a sane API with multiple sizes including thumbnails handled for you was pretty wild.
Yes, API was the other best thing about Flickr. A friend made his fortune, especially during the exodus days of Flickr. He traveled around the world photographing some of the best pictures I have seen in my life. He retired pretty early in the Himalayas (he is originally from there).
He made Bulkr, which was one of those tools that just works and super easy to use, in getting all of your photos offline from Flickr. I don't think it works anymore. His revenue and hits went crazy after Veronica Belmont talked about it.
https://brajeshwar.com/2011/bulkr-access-and-backup-your-fli...
> This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme.
Elrond?
Yes, correct. Elrond reminded Gandalf. I remembered Gandalf better.
Love those old photos of Macromedia - my wife worked in the same building at the time and they bring back a lot of nice memories :)
No comment on your photos, but I think this abomination of a cookie selection banner is all on needs to see to decide on the current state of Flickr. It's literally several pages long!
This article got me curious as I used Flickr years ago. Sadly couldn’t even move past the cookie banner at all. Too bad
on the pro side, they do have a "reject all" which many do not.
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
As a subscriber for something like two decades I respect them for being sober businesspeople and keeping the platform alive for paying customers, rather than dumping losses for growth hacks and then ending up a smoking crater.
> 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.
Thats weird. They deleted almost all my pictures.
(I am not really mad at them btw.)
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, terrible resolution, no EXIF data, and certainly no easy way to link a photo to anything outside of Instagram. That EXIF data makes it so much easier to search photos - although it could do with some AI autotagging. Surely that's coming down the pike...
Lastly, it's like an internet time capsule. There are accounts that started in the early 2000s and haven't been touched since the 2010s, and you can still pull full resolution imagery from there. And there are people even more old fashioned (and probably even more old) than me, still uploading new photos and old slides.
It sucks that Yahoo didn't do anything with Instagram, but I'm glad it also managed to avoid completely destroying it.
It's insane that a platform like Instagram that is focused on photo sharing compresses and downsizes photos so much.
Because Zuckerberg. It's not the original platform anymore. You have to keep that in mind at ALL times with anything he buys
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 :\
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...
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 photo archive, but is missing the social features.
To be honest, with the advent of GenAI, I'm now reluctant to share my photos publicly because I don't like the feeling that my work will be slurped up for AI model training..
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
Hey, owner & CEO here. Reading this now, but AMA.
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.g., would love to see a camera AND lens combination finder, search by EXIF, enhancements to the world map, etc.). Very much looking forward to more modern file types.
And while I think the site strikes the balance decently at the moment, Pro is too expensive for ads to get more intrusive (for the Pro user and for others looking at his/her photos).
But as I hope was clear, I'm a big supporter and would love to see the platform continue to thrive. If you're ever looking to bounce thoughts off a user, or anything else, I'm happy to help!
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!
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.
We’re allergic to ads. If I knew how to make Flickr work at its scale without ads even on free accounts, I’d do it.
Since I can’t figure it out (yet?), free accounts have ads and Pro don’t. As long as I’m running the show, that will remain true.
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.
I want this, too. SmugMug (our other platform) supports them. So we already have the tech done (for a long time). I hope we add support on Flickr.
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 always the slight dread that you kill Flickr because it's a blip of a side hustle to the main business.
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 raised a round of funding, as long as the bills are getting paid, we can do what we want - build a company for the long-term based on a great photography community. So that's what we're doing. :)
Good to hear. Still happily paying for Pro every year and using the API to pull images into my website.
Thank you. This is great to hear!
And, thank you for that! Still my favorite site on the internet.
FYI - I loved reading your blog posts ~20 years ago about how you were building your server infrastructure (hardware, dedicated, onprem, etc).
If any more recent post exist on similar topics, I’d be fascinated to read more.
Thanks! I get asked to write again frequently, but finding the time is tough. I'll see what I can do. :)
Hey, long-time Flickr user who migrated to Google Photos for a somewhat specific use case. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/perardi)
I do a lot of event photography as a creative outlet. I want my friends to be able to download individual photos and photo albums easily. As an example, I just photographed a fundraiser for my rugby team last week, and I made all my shots available in a Google Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PfwHpEJejywBRiZp7
And while that works, I don’t necessarily love feeding all my creative content into the Google machine. I would rather support a diverse photography ecosystem.
Have you explored making downloading individual photos and albums a prominent feature? Mind you, I realize I am weird photographer who does this stuff for free, and I don’t care about attribution or watermarks. I just want my friends to be able to get their photos easily.
Thanks for the feedback and feature request. I don't hear this request often for Flickr, but it's a core and beloved feature on our other platform, SmugMug, which you might want to check out if you haven't.
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.
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. :)
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.
As far as I know, we haven't considered that, but it's a good idea. I'll noodle on it. Thanks!
Is that not what Wikimedia is for?
Hello. I just logged in for the first time in a while and it asked me to verify my age, despite the fact that my Flickr account is 22 years old. I've been paying for Flickr Pro as long as that has been possible, if I remember correctly, my Flickr user number was ~620. Surely, with an account that's 22 years old you don't need to hand my personal information to Peter Thiel?
To some degree I only still pay for it out of nostalgia for what it was. I stopped using it when it started trying to upload my entire camera roll every time I opened the mobile app - Flickr was never about storing all your photos on someone else's server, it was about curation and community. It somewhat lost that as phone photography got more popular, and instead of empowering users to do that directly on their phone, it presented itself as a mere backup utility. The app seems to be entirely non-functional now, no content loads at all for me. Flickr's failure to move with the rise mobile photography feels like its biggest misstep - age verification for an account that is 22 years old though might actually convince me to stop paying. I'm not using it, the mobile app is broken, and now it wants to hand my PII to a third party.
We have a lot of mobile usage and the app works fine, so I'd love to know more about what you're experiencing with it. Can you contact our Support Heroes so we can assist? https://www.flickrhelp.com/
You make a fair point about the age verification thing. I'll look into it. It's probably based on a legal requirement that we have to deal with, even if the solution is silly. Sorry about that.
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?
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.
A company bought them so that they weren’t shutdown from revenue loss, and then instituted a policy of “pay for what you like” to resolve uncontrollable storage costs. Sounds like every other “free at first” cloud provider, and one should reasonably expect the same from any “freemium unlimited” present-day or future provider as well. I’m not faulting you for taking offense at it, but that’s not bait and switch, that’s bog standard normal business, and why I’ll never again post my photos to a free site. If they aren’t charging me now, they’re going to piss me off someday when they either do charge me or spontaneously collapse before ArchiveTeam gets ahold of them.
> 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 agree with that. And then I moved to 500px, and it was the same. Started off promising, became very homogenous. Landscapes like you say, and the People sections were heavy with Eastern European semi-soft focus nudes in nature.
One thing I can say about 500px is that it's one of the few Internet properties I made money on without really having to do anything more than just use it (newsvine was the other)
I uploaded a bunch of photos once, forgot about them, and then a year or two later got an email asking to license them for commercial/stock use
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 transferring the data from the dslr to my phone, and the auto uploader takes care of the rest.
From there I can go through the photos, decide which ones I wanna make public, and organize them into my albums to share with others.
My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
Can you elaborate on the markdown embed request? In which contexts would you want that?
I explained it here back when their forum was still open: https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157714720744427/pa...
They have bbcode and html embed, with dynamic width and automatic linking back to the page with alt text, but nothing for markdown.
I can use HTML for my blog but my blog is written and marked down and I would rather just stick to markdown, plus many forums have switched to markdown and won't accept an HTML embed.
My current solution is to convert the following by hand from something like
To:<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/uname/1234/" title="My Title"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/1234/abcd.jpg" width="1024" height="768" alt="My Alt Text" /></a>
For every photo I like to share which can be a lot when I am blogging...[](www.flickr.com/photos/uname/1234)
> My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
fwiw, a lot of markdown parsers allow some amount of HTML also.
Pasting a html img tag into your markdown documents might work, depending on which parser is used.
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 community has been welcoming so far.
I yearn for a good site to share and comment photos which is a bit more open, though.
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 syndicate them to (in order of preference): Glass, Pixelfed, Instagram, Irys.
I've tried Irys as well but the mobile only is kind of a deal breaker for me — I like seeing images in the big monitor to appreciate them more.
Of course I also have my webpage to showcase my favourite pictures but I feel I'm more picky in that site than in, say, Glass and instagram, since I want to show 'the best' there :-)
>it doesn't offer a web-based version
>It's probably even more photographer-oriented
not even remotely serious? ridiculous
I just tried glass.photo. It doesn‘t allow to upload more than 10 photos at once, and if you upload 2 or more you have to put them in a so-called series (like an album?).
Still use it. It's a treasure trove of photos from 2004 - 2015, and easy to search / filter.
It's a crying shame that instagram "won" the photo war, because it is straight up impossible to search / filter through.
Flickr has been mentioned in interviews by the founders of both Vimeo and YouTube as having been a direct inspiration on the creation of both of those sites. It got a lot of the design right the first time. Flickr and the projects that emerged out of the context it pioneered changed the world.
I considered Flickr as a place for my photography portfolio, but I can't recommend it to anyone. Try sharing a portfolio link with someone who doesn't have an account there. It'll open with these nasty pop-ups, even if you have the paid version.
So I looked for a good alternative and found the paid https://glass.photo/ -- almost no one uses it, the service probably won't survive the next 5-10 years, but at least the UI/UX is done with some thought
Actually… Glass has a pretty stable base and consistent month-over-month growth. It has a sustainable business model, has been profitable since day 1, and is immune to investor pressure (it has none). I think it’ll be fine.
I think I like about Flickr is the add a note feature. Not sure if other platforms has any similar feature but I find it helpful for me to add note on part on the photo for future reference such as place or anything peculiar.
What, no shade on photobucket?
Single handedly created a lot of issues for anyone maintaining old cars…
oh man, I haven't heard of photobucket in years! A great place for those nostalgics of the old web, especially if you used forums. Photobucket was THE srvice to upload images to post on forums, including the "famous" signatures, gifs, etc.
Don't forget ImageShack!
SmugMug is pretty great.
I still remember their Sun Server JBOD posts.
Which is basically a "pro-ish-plus" version of Flickr from the same owners as far as I know. I've been a Pro user of Flickr for a long time but probably hard to justify at this point which probably means that it's even harder to justify for the average consumer. Interviewewed them back in the day when they were a prominent AWS customer.
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.
I haven't been to SmugMug in years (decade?) but wow, holy early 2000s big bold brash neon web design. Then there's this huge scrolling ticker in 72pt text at the top, "free festival passes for the next 50 subscribers" that has been there ... for a few days now. Gives total "You may already be a winner!" vibes.
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.
Was this before or after Yahoo! purchased! them?!
After Yahoo
Doesn't sound like us. When was this?
2008-ish?
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.
haha did something similar. Ended up vibe-coding something with Hugo and using backblaze + cloudflare proxy to host the images. So far everything has been free and I have a snappy 'portfolio' :-)'
@onethumb Is it possible that Flickr will be integrated into SmugMug eventually or it will remain as its own branch? I know it is difficult to say for sure but some direction for near future?
Instagram didn’t kill Flickr by being better for photographers, but by being better at distribution.
I'm not sure if this is what you mean by "distribution", but I think Instagram won by being content-consumption-centric. People who used Flickr were mostly other photographers. People on Instagram are mostly your customers: people planning their own weddings, moms with newborn children, etc. It's basically a marketing platform, so it's a no-brainer for current or aspiring pros.
It sucks for passionate hobbyists, but photography is first and foremost an industry.
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.
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.
People have this real tendency to say x never would have accomplished y, when in fact the ecosystem was ripe for it
The Winklevoss twins, whose project Zuckerberg intentionally delayed while he got to market first (whatever it was. I don't know exactly. Some say it was only a dating site. Some say they used bootstrapping effects to onboard colleges first). It was 2003 or whatever. It very well could've disrupted Myspace or Friendster and made them multi billionaires
"Instagram had no users" people really liked Instagram. It could've taken off, if it wasn't already
Whatsapp - Whatsapp was profitable. Now Zuck has access to your phone numbers
Stop a) whitewashing his history and b) stop assuming "blah never would have accomplished". That's an utterly bizarre take in the face of theft
> Zuck purely bought it to murder competition in the crib
That makes no sense. It’s very obviously been nurtured and grown by orders of magnitude since acquisition.
Turning it into a copy of facebook
In a very different direction. Photos are almost a second class citizen on IG now. Stories. Reels. Shit, a quarter of my feed is (very repetitive) ads.
It's absolutely grown, but the concept of IG was definitely "de-prioritized".
No mention of Picasa?
It turned into Google Photos quite a while ago, so not really sure how it’s relevant anymore.
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).
By the creator of Slack, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield.
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.
I was active there before 2010. I liked taking photos, good gear, interesting perspectives, and Flickr was a great way to explore the work of other like-minded folks, usually with much better photos than mine.
The only thing I disliked was the mandatory Yahoo email, that I had no other use. I knew I would eventually lock myself out, and I did. I forgot about Flickr.
Until about a year ago when I went back out of nostalgia, tried to recover my access, and succeeded! Big thanks and kudos to the team allowing that with other email! Unfortunately, I am not that active anymore; my life has changed, and I no longer have enough time and energy for good photos. Still, will be back from time to time.
They introduced a limit to 1000 photos, I deleted almost everything, then somehow they didn’t go through with the limitation, only warning me about nearing 1000 photos. Anyone knows what exactly happened?
To me, Flickr is the better Photo.net. Photo.net has been around since 1993 and apparently is still running, but it never was a site where you could just collect your own work and share them the way you wanted. It would be interesting to read about how Flickr succeeded against an older, established competitor.
photo.net is the water cooler. flickr is the portfolio. They're different. I never talked to anyone on flickr. I'm still friends with people from photo.net
photo.net is more like a public ridicule session that Maoists would have dreamed up. It was impossible to just post a photo there without every rando on the site feeling like they needed to criticize your composition and exposure.
Anyone reading this who was part of the Toronto Flickr Meetups, just sayin Howdy! Long time, no see.
If you want to see the future of photo platforms like Flickr, you should download the cooliris.swf file from here:
https://github.com/cooliris/embed-wall
If you're on MacOS, you can run the file with this software:
This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities. In ten or so years, everybody will use it for multimedia.
Flickr wasn't the first, and it sure wasn't great. It was just popular. The MySpace of image hosting would be apt, down to how awful using the website was.
It was atrocious.