Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme
unsung.aresluna.org
unsung.aresluna.org
They implemented the Where On Earth ID (WOEID) which was a super useful way of disambiguating different places that shared latitude and longitude (for example, being able to disambiguate the Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay and Sydney Harbour which all can potentially share the same lat/long co-ords).
They implemented machine tags which are tags in the form of -
namespace:predicate=value
Which, when it was implemented by other sites with machine tags allowed you to get and group all kinds of interesting combinations of content.
Yeah, honestly flickr had some incredible tech the was so much fun to explore and use. That their vision of what the web could be wasn't the one that won is one of the great losses of the web IMO.
Flickr + MechanicalTurk == ImageNet
The priceless legacy of Web 2.0 golden age
No? Because what would it be based on and if you edited the thing that it's based on then the URL would either change, or get out of sync which woudl suck. You could ignore the suffix meaning flickr.com/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904-<everything-past-the-previous-dash-is-ignored> I'm not sure if that would be a positive, although I guess S.O. does something like that. The issue is other sites really want to know if it's a link to the same resource or a different resource. And while you could redirect to the new one that just makes more work for everyone.
> I would get rid of /photos
I wouldn't because then you'd had have https://flickr.com/settings but that would not be a user named "settings" and the same for every other alternate purpose URL
Thats what the canonical link is for, isn't it? [0]
RFC 6596 introduced it in 2012. Other websites, like search engines or social media, have been using it for a while.
[0] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
Other sites grab contact information or verification headers. So they also load the page.
Seems like the only people who wouldn't want to load at all, would be those places where deduplication doesn't matter in the first place.
That's usually how people do it.
Just another reason to say who cares to human readable bits in the location. Most browsers hide that data anyways.
Internet archeology is something I've always found fascinating, and I don't think people realize how much data has been lost after we moved to the modern "big tech" internet of today. So many data hosting services disappear back in the mid/late 00s, and with that, the data too. After social media exploded, many just stared storing all their photos there.
Easily readable URLs is something I learned in the 90s and I still try to enforce in everything I create.
Also, when you look at a site and see URLs like /wiki/index.php/MyPage it tells you about the skill level and care of the site administrators.
I could try to imagine these limitations and how the Internet Archive overcomes them, but I'd prefer reading about it.
Edit: I misremembered. They append the date to the URL to avoid name conflicts, like `/details/hey_20260122`.
I think Youtube got it right early. Make it short enough but random, so users won't be tempted to manually type it out and make mistakes but if they really do need to manually type it the length is reasonable. It also made sharing via SMS/Twitter limits more feasible.
Would be nice to know if you'd made a typo rather than just hitting a blank ID in the vast space of all possible video IDs.
Having the /{username} at the root of the routing logic means that every URL should either query the user database for a match or use /{username} as a catch-all fallback if no other patterns match. But this makes resolving real 404 pages much more expensive.
E.g. flickr.com/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904 does take you to flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904
You can absolutely still do this. I'm still a Flickr Pro subscriber since 2015, and I still regularly upload photos to Flickr. I don't think there was a set of changes that reduced Flickr to an also-ran, the entire market shifted. First, there was a shift away from photography being focused on what I will short hand as "quality" towards being focused on what I'll short hand as "moments" with services like Instagram, which had 100m users by the end of 2013 and continued growing exponentially from there, which was deeply interconnected with the introduction of reliable fairly high-quality phone cameras built into smart phones.
Flickr was, and continues to be, a place where people who use actual camera equipment post photos that are taken not just to capture a moment, but to express a scene, using technique and artistry to do so. That type of high quality photography doesn't really get much traction in more contemporary social media, because the photos of moments shared on Instagram weren't about the photo, they were about the moment. It was about proving that you were in a place or experienced a thing, and the place or thing giving you social value. "Pics or it didn't happen."
Instagram has now largely been supplanted by TikTok, because short video is now much more of a common, engaging, and desired format than photography, and thankfully this means Flickr in 2026 is once again a refuge of die-hard photographers sharing their works, and not seeing much attempt to change it into Instagram 2.0. Many (maybe most) of the photos on Flickr are now taken with smartphones, but there is still an expectation from the community to focus on expressing a scene using technique and artistry, and modern smartphones now have good enough cameras to do just that without detracting from what you're trying to express.
Flickr is an unsung hero in this. I uploaded photos back in 2011 when I purchased my first DLSR camera, and had forgotten about them until this day, and seems they're still up! Did some other checks for content I uploaded back then, and seemingly only my YouTube and Vimeo videos are still up, everything else I spot checked from the same period seems to be gone by now.
Kind of neat for a free photo hosting platform.
I understand the Yahoo part, but what do you mean with smugmug? My impression was that they bought it and "revived" it but I might misremember the history there.
flickr is alive and well
That's like saying Tumblr/MySpace got ruined by acquisitions, in reality people just moved on to other platforms like it always happens with social networks over time.
They don't rely on title alone, it's a separate identifier. You can set it to anything and you can't change it afterwards but you can change the title.
It's been a long while, but if I recall, the url schema was something like a00.photobucket.com/albums/username/someimage.jpg
But what was really cool about it was that you could change someimage.jpg to someimage.png and Photobucket would serve a PNG instead. Or you could change someimage.jpg to th_someimage.jpg and Photobucket would serve a thumbnail of the picture. It was very cool.
The auto serving of the chosen output extension is interesting. Wonder if they were automatically created when making the various image sizes, or only on the first time it was requested. And how many formats were supported? The one that got me was hitting an API and tagging with xml|json to get the response as needed instead of sending it as a dedicated query paramter
I just know I didn't log in for 10+ years and now when I do, most of my photos are gone. Oh well
maybe I will check again
edit: yep they have only my latest 50 photos (from 2014).
edit2: ah they did that in 2024 apparently. oh well whatever.
I would be very confused if flickr.com/contact went to a user page.
The oldest account have a direct URL in the form of youtube.com/username. Newer account had youtube.com/user/username (I think most account have both URLs).
Then YouTube was bought by Google and they introduced "channels", so some channels had youtube.com/channel/username.
Then YouTube wanted to become like TikTok and they forced at-usernames some years ago, so now accounts have a URL like youtube.com/@username
tiktok.com/@about
vs
tiktok.com/about
Maybe become some foreign keyboard layouts don't have the ~ symbol?
Much later in history Twitter popularized the form "@user" to refer to a personal identity. I'm not sure if they invented the usage or not. This is distinct, but probably somehow cognitively related, to the use of "user@host" for email addresses after bang paths fell out of favor.
For reasons I can't quite put my finger on @user seems a much better sigil than ~user to me, so I'm not bothered that it's become popular.
I think this makes sense if you pronounce the action. On Twitter you'd tweet [at] user(s). I think it made even more sense back in the Twitter via SMS where you had to send a message to Twitter's number but direct at a particular user.
Haha, no it just takes forcing user account name changes.
github.com/copilot, github.com/claude, github.com/models, basically everything you can think of for the last few years has been through this approach.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210702114132/github.com/copilo... some proof this was an actual user
I like that the EU recognised this and did start to regulate that these companies need to interoperate.
I learned quickly to avoid Flickr links.
It's possible they did not allow the way you tried to access images directly, to enable control of the downloads for the photographer. But I think you misjudged the behaviour back then, they were pretty open.
Typically, sites check that the referer header is from one of their sites to prevent hotlinking.
Can someone let Apple know this ? Safari URL bar is a disaster. If I edit a URL say to remove a part and hit enter 9/10 times it searches the internet.
It seems to forget that it's a url it's displaying despite it cutting the front off, even after telling it to use long urls in address bar. It's so annyoing I actually use another browser since I often need to paste in or modify urls for the work I do. Safari sucks hard. Any solutions to disabling 'search' in the address bar ? I want it to be a URL bar only, and anythign typed in it should be resolved and not searched.
?set=2546&pic=8597 is much easier to decipher than /2546/8597
I'm sorry what? URL params are just a thing.
Stopped caring about them when they cancelled their 1TB free storage after 5 years, company which can't be trusted long term with your data. Plus the UI was horrible anyway.