The Flickr Foundation
flickr.org
flickr.org
I don't much use FB or instagram anymore, I go through instagram every so often, when I don't check things for months, and I scroll a few times and it tells me I caught up! FB and Instagram are mostly just sponsored or commercial posts on my feed, instagram just stops showing stuff from friends after a few scrolls, FB is maybe 1 in 3 posts are from my friends.
I share an album from Flickr and people get an ad free view of what I wanted to share, far superior.
I'll try it and see if I can get in.
I’d love a simple photo sharing service now that the only thing high-res on Facebook are the ads.
Flickr was, I think, one of those "Web 2.0" thing. I got in a few months after it started. I remember a good friend who became sorta millionaire building tools for Flickr (I think he retired in the Himalayas or near it with his family). I remember him more vividly because his test account was my Flickr account - an account with enough photos not to choke his tool, and other test options. In turn, I learned quite a lot of photography skills.
Flickr, in my opinion has a wide enough base of people, generally interested in photography, to mirror some of the positive effects of sharing to Instagram.
It was no doubt better in the past. But there is still a lot of people on the platform and an okay amount of interaction.
In my opinion there is still a potential for rewamping the platform and make it even better.
One thing is that Flickr's geographic search/exploration feels like it was Frankenstein-bolted onto the base site.
The geographic search would be interesting and fun if it worked well, but its current implementation just feels... weird?... and non-functional.
I use Flickr a lot.
But about twice per year, I think, "I should give Instagram a try again." Each time I try, it just comes across as loud and garish. And even if it weren't loud and garish, you can't really get a good look at high-res photos on Instagram. It takes me about 30 seconds to realize, "Oh yeah. Now I remember why I don't like Instagram."
I guess loud / garish / low-res is the price you pay for Instagram's huge popularity. I hope Flickr can find that happy medium of being popular enough to stay alive, but not so popular that it takes on the characteristics that make Instagram unseemly.
It concerns me what will happen to them when I am gone. At the moment I have a web site where they are hosted but I don't expect my children to be able to admin that once I am no longer here.
I would be more than happy to donate it all to Flickr Commons.
Just create an account and upload them. Create a collection called `historic transport photographs` and they will live on.
And of course, it's possible to upload your own under open license, if you want to preserve them in that way. The most common is Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike.
Happy to see Flickr continue to find ways to live on.
Fun fact: Flickr started as a never ending web-based game where photos became a highly used feature. Similar to how Instagram came to be.
> In December 2020, Ben MacAskill (President and COO of SmugMug + Flickr) asked me to return to the fold to figure out how to revitalize the Flickr Commons program.
So my brain decided that it was Stewart Butterfield, announcing his next move after leaving Slack. But, no, the "me" was Executive Director George Oates.[1]
Anyways, Flickr was a large part of my life when I started with Sony's point-n-shoot digital camera in early 2000s. I started Flickr in 2004 with the gifted pro account for signing up and left it in 2015. The last-ish photo is of the one I laugh out aloud (alone in the London Tube) -- a marketing design trying to say that buying tickets were so easy -- but to hone in on what the picture meant, they had to write - (piece of cake).
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/19704146340/in/date...
My account says 11.7 Million views, so people seem to be still looking around while I'm away.
I wonder what changed.
Dunno why they make it a modal anyway.
I gave up on Flickr this year.
Some time early next year I've had a Flickr Pro account for 20 years. For about 17-18 of those years, Flickr hasn't made much of an effort, and when I think about it, I'm a bit cross with myself for having given them my money for so long with so little in return. I should have stopped giving them my money more than a decade ago. And so should everyone else so that whoever has been in charge over the years got an actual incentive to get off their asses and do something about the site. To at least develop a vision that is something other than "let's coast for a couple of decades".
I know there have been attempts to revive it, but they have, at best, been anemic and episodic.
For the first 10 years I stayed there in order to keep in contact with all the people I had gotten to know in the first couple of years. In the brief period when Flickr was a good place to meet people also interested in photography. People gradually disappeared over that decade. Flickr became a ghost-town. I remember browsing it now and then to see who was still around.
The next decade I stayed on because I didn't want the photos I had uploaded to just vanish from the web. Which is a nonsense reason because I have all of the photos in my archive anyway, so I can just re-upload them somewhere else.
For me to come back to Flickr whoever owns it now has to demonstrate that they are serious about creating a photography site. It has to be fast, it has to be photography focused, it has to offer navigation/discovery that isn't slow and ugly and clumsy. And perhaps it has to also cater to the intersection between blogs and photography as a lot of the more interesting photography sites I follow now are really blogs.
The community that once existed is gone. It won't come back. People have moved on. That doesn't mean that there can't be a new community. But it takes some doing.
flickr is the company and the product, flickr foundation is about preserving flickr "Creative Commons"[1] images forever.
>Flickr has grown into one of the biggest photo collections on Earth. It contains tens of billions of images from people all over the world, and keeps growing every day. That’s why we’ve created the Flickr Foundation—an independent, community-focused organization. We’re committed to stewarding this cultural treasure for future generations, and fostering a visual commons we can all enjoy. [1]
And
>Today, the Flickr holds “tens of billions of images” documenting our planet from the first days of photography to just a moment ago. What if—should the ship go down—we had an archival copy of your Flickr presence ready? Simply admitting this might happen and preparing for it is a form of preservation. We call it a data lifeboat.
You have probably been affected by web services that go dark or disappear, often with little or no warning. We think that’s not good enough, especially for an archive as precious as Flickr (and your photos), so we want to design a better way.
It’s all at risk—though not in imminent danger—and that’s why the foundation has been set up. SmugMug has acknowledged the risk and set us the task of imagining and determining how to make sure this huge piece of human history doesn’t sink.
We will work initially with the smaller and openly-licensed subset of imagery held within the Flickr Commons. Using this collection as our baseline, we will explore the edges of what’s required to create a data lifeboat that’s transportable, buoyant, and robust.[2]
[1] https://www.flickr.org/ [2] https://www.flickr.org/programs/content-mobility/data-lifebo...
https://archive.vn/Uw6p3 so many can do so.
In the spirit of joining in on breaking HN guidelines, the page is broken with ublock origin blocking some shitty cookie popup. I could only read it in firefox reader mode, else it just dims out and locks the scroll with 'Hello World'.
It is definitely the plan for the .com to continue as a commercial enterprise.
The .org is a new organization, a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. There's minority company representation on our Board, and we have all the official governance things like by-laws set up. The .com has funded the establishment of the .org to date, for which we are profoundly grateful, and we all expect and hope to diversify the .org revenue from now on.
Both parties are aware of, and working to ensure, that the .org can also be independent of the .com if and when it needs to be. We would like to avoid the risk of a new CEO coming in and shutting it all down, as we are witnessing now in other arenas!
Archiving with a narrative, so to speak.