Facebook Upgrades Photos: Look Out, Flickr | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Upgrades Photos: Look Out, Flickr

mash.to

38 pointsdavidedicillo19 comments

Shout-out to pcardune, who came over from Divvyshot and did a lot of the hi-res stuff at Facebook. Other members of the photos team who were integral to this launch & are HN lurkers: beau, nroman, justinmitchell, makinde.

For the record: we didn't build the product with the goal of competing with Flickr.

I didn't see the hi-res stuff yet, but I consider the photo sharing and presenting to be very good at Facebook. If you guys could manage to compete with Flickr, that would be even greater.

Will photos that have already been uploaded be made available in higher resolutions or will that only be available to newly uploaded photos?

I wouldn't take that as a Flickr competition. Flickr is more about delivering photo experience to the masses, a great platform for promoting and discovering pictures about a certaing subject, etc. Facebook is more about sharing with your social cirle. Currently there isn't any tool able to compete with Flickr in terms of exploring content.

Flickr is pretty horrible as a photo site. It's full of garbage, the options of browsing quality content are very limited.

Try to get the highest rated photos of the last week/month/year, for example.

  Try to get the highest rated photos of the last week/month/year, for example.

I don't really know anyone that uses flickr this way, or at least i should say that flickr is not explicitly about quantitatively accessing massive photosets.

Highest rated photos, though? I don't think taste is a numerical metric.

edit: superfluous asterisks

What you say doesn't prove that is horrible as a photo site. Yes, you're right, exploring through 'ratings' often leads to garbage if one has some better taste in photography, as in most of photo rankings and contests on the web. That doesn't mean that it doesn't meet it's purpose as a photo sharing website. Also, besides it's native explore/search functions there are tools around flickr where you can explore photos through different parameters, try f.ex. using my buddy's tool http://fffflckr.com/ it grabs 'favorites of your favorites', it's quite handy and it's easier to find sth you probably will like.

I've used their API many times for some experiments, and if you feel you got a way to find great content, it'll be probably very easy to build a tool for that. That's also a great advantage of flickr.

My Flickr photos are carefully-composed shots I've taken with my DSLR that I want to share with the site's community of enthusiast photographers. My Facebook photos are quick phone snaps that I think my friends would get a kick out of. Isn't this how most people divide their use between the two services?

Nice work Sam Odio and Paul Carduner (my former YC batch friends at Divvyshot).

I think both cater to a different set of people/photos. I upload only those photos to Facebook which have a 'social' element - Birthdays, weekend trips with friends etc. But Flickr is more for photos which I click as a hobby and as a photo backup service.

Also on flickr there are a lot of pros using it to maintain their portfolios, but definitely I think Facebook photos are one of the reasons of its success.

Finally facebook is making use of Divyashot it bought few months ago.

Like others, I use Facebook for photos I want to share with friends and Flickr as a portfolio. Having said that, I think Facebook has a much better interface (why does Flickr still insist my photos need a title?) and having this option is good.

It would be nice to see Facebook improve the quality of standard photos too. They're generally noisy as hell and have rubbish compression artifacts. Compare Facebook: http://bit.ly/bT1bjA and Flickr: http://bit.ly/c0a0FO

Looks good, Sam :)

Sure, Flickr is one of the services Facebook seeks to replace. Basically, at this point Facebook is a big mashup of email, IM/chat, Flickr, Twitter and a blog.

Can I export my photos yet? No? Still not a photo competitor, much less a Flickr competitor.

Facebook's API (both the new Graph API, and the old REST one) supports this (it allows access to the URLs, and the terms do not prohibit this). I have personally written an application that allows the downloading of photos.

I think it would be nice if this was supported in a more straightforward fashion (e.g. a large "Download" link on every album), but I think it would be better for Facebook to concentrate on storing photos in their original size, or at least better educating people that their photos are being downsized upon storage.

Aaand less than seven days later, they allow bulk downloads of your pictures, amongst your other data. Huh.

Speaking of which, I was sad to notice that www.divvyshot.com just forwards to FB.

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