The social part makes it all "oh, I was there too it was such a nice day, are you coming to my party next week?".... I'm guessing that's FB. Facebook = happysnap. Instagram = happiersnap.
This article is from 2012, and is off the mark. Flickr is still up and running, even if crammed with ads sending uBlock into a frenzy.
If anything, photographic collections and studies don't have the appeal they once had due to the trillions of images we see everywhere now. The eyesore of over-sharpened, over-saturated, too high dynamic ranged retina candy. Good photography now is back in the galleries where it should be...IMHO, the image resting on a print not emitting any light of its own. No blinding pixels, and hopefully matte paper, no glass.
What the parent says is that this, even if true, the above is totally irrelevant.
There's not much of a market for "photographers to showcase their work in isolation from other noise" or for "people to browse photos in specific categories and collections".
What there's actually a huge user base for that can be turned into ad money is casually sharing photos AMONG other stuff, with friends and relatives. Which is what Facebook offers.
This killed Flickr, except in the way you describe -- which nobody (as in: few millions of people) cares about.
I would venture that Avenue Q had a more accurate view of this (in the song "The Internet is for Porn").
When you invest in camera gear then study or explore photography, you will gravitate away from junk food image sharing platforms, and instead find places dedicated to skills, techniques and themed photography showcases and resources.
Nobody killed Flickr. It could use some interface and feature improvements, and probably some new administrators or project teams, but it's still there doing what it does. For what it's worth, I was never a big fan of Flickr due to the lack of control over how your gallery page could look and function.
No, but Facebook level businesses are.
>Random funny pics and cheeseburgers will always be greater markets, but that is irrelevant.
And so is Flickr in the context of the grandparent's comment.
>Nobody killed Flickr. It could use some interface and feature improvements, and probably some new administrators or project teams, but it's still there doing what it does.
Killing for a social medium, even more so a business-run social medium, is not about not being able to do "what it does".
It's about being unable to monetize it, it losing mind-share, people moving away, the action getting elsewhere etc.
Flickr actually did the social aspect well with their communities. What they missed was transitioning this social component to mobile.
And the UI change around 2013 where they got rid of the grid layout and moved to some Pintrest collage / infinite scroll ostracized a lot of users.
Flickr could be made really useful if Yahoo provides a "make a photographer website" with Flickr backing as photo storage backend. Imagine I am looking for a wedding photographer nearby. I need to browse their work, want to know their rates, and even book time. Perhaps also an option to "sell my photo for use" and even a way to search for illegal usage of photo (it is a concern for many professional photographers).
Flickr had a relatively active blog that would showcase photos relative to special days (e.g. Pi Day photos). On top of that, there was Flickr Explore that could be thought of as the front page of interesting photos.
And in terms of communities, anyone could make a community. So if you were a plane spotter, you could start (and there are), communities dedicated to that. You live in Boston and want to have a Boston Photographers Group? Done! Wedding photographers? Here you go:
https://www.flickr.com/groups/weddingphoto/
https://www.flickr.com/groups/flickr_wedding_photojournalism...
There were plenty of communities on Flickr and that's one thing I feel like hasn't really filled the void. 500px and VSCO exist, but they're a bit too focused for most amateurs or casual photo snappers.
Flickr for many was this soup of personal vacation photos, along with people visually documenting their non-photographic hobbies, and photographic-focused photographers. Their photostream was the lifestream for many. I met a handful of friends from Flickr not because of photography, but because they seemed like interesting people.
Perhaps this also speaks of social media now--we're fluent with the medium and now carefully polish our online identities. But in this process of self-curation, we've lost what makes us real and interesting.
I do find flickr a useful place to upload my selected photos. I can display "slideshows" from there, share them with friends, etc. But, if flickr didn't exist, I'd easily enough find some other way to do the same thing whether self-hosted or otherwise.
To quote some execs I had a meeting with at Yahoo when we were acquired by them "we don't innovate: we copy what others do and make it better".
Not only is this an idiotic strategy, but it was one they consistently failed at. They never made anything better. I did point out at the time that I thought they were being delusional.
I left in 2005 because it was obvious the company didn't have any actual leadership. Just indecision and half measures. I left because I used none of the products anymore.
Yahoo handed the victory to Facebook.
Facebook certainly brought photo sharing to the masses, but most Flickr users were actually "a bunch of amateurs obsessed with lens quality", at least the active ones. Most of these didn't move their photography to Facebook but to other sites like 500px and later Instagram.
I agree with the article, Flickr died because Yahoo let it rot.
And then placed ads on the corpse.
Turns out people still like to snap pictures and post them online in 2017. And they don't care that much about quality.
If people cared about quality, vimeo would be bigger than youtube. It isn't.
One of the reasons I hate posting on Facebook is that you can comment on every little thing, and frankly not everything warrants a comment thread. Despite what is warranted, some people cannot help themselves and write pointless things on just about any picture. Instead of just a nice posting of $PICTURE, I then have $UNWANTED_TEXT next to my picture, forever (unless I erase and repost the image but that will just trigger Facebook's "HEY WORLD, LOOK WHAT HE JUST POSTED" algorithms again).
Flickr users weren't obsessed with lens quality, they were obsessed with good looking pictures. Facebook spent 10 years (and maybe still) adding horrible jpeg compression to photos.
Not to say all those people don't also post photos to Facebook, but saying Facebook killed Flickr is akin to saying Facebook killed Google Code and everyone is uploading their code to Facebook now.
Obviously that's a silly comparison, but my point is, for people using Flickr as intended, Facebook isn't really a substitute.
Facebook is not shutterstock or getty, photo is not their business, providing their useds with as little friction so they can be exposed to the customer's ads longer is their core business.
If flickr wanted back in the game they'd have to jump in the mobile market and re-design their traditional web platform.