Flickr: The first and last great photo platform
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
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 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.
as someone who goes down many rabbit holes on wikipedia, i appreciate this comment and all of those CC photos
The elegance of flickr is just nice and browsing is fun.
I wonder if there are more sites like it.
It’s cool that they used PHP, I always thought it was RoR platform.
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.
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.
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/
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...
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.
(I am not really mad at them btw.)
Elrond?
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.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...
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..
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. :)
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.
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!
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!
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.
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?
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.
If any more recent post exist on similar topics, I’d be fascinated to read more.
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.
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.
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.
No hate speech, no Nazis, no pornography, no weird screenshots, no spam.
Nothing surprised me, basically what I’d expect.
My experience with similar 'some things are okay, we know it when we see it' - is that support is extremely hostile if it responds (vimeo) .. non-existant if you are banned (google, meta / facebook)
and most often "sorry everything is deleted, your content, friends list, messages - all gone." (all of the above including tumblr)
So yeah, building content and friend's lists on other people's farmland is a thing of the past. with censorship that costs you friends and data people are better off self hosting and doing the fediverse thing, or going to places that explicitly allow almost all explicit things.
There was a time when flickr was very cool for sharing and making friends with people in niches that was to hard find in many places, same with tumblr and it was ruined in a similar way.
It's fine, and I completely understand, it's just not what it once was. Many things are not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
<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>
[](www.flickr.com/photos/uname/1234)
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.
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.
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's probably even more photographer-oriented
not even remotely serious? ridiculous
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
That makes no sense. It’s very obviously been nurtured and grown by orders of magnitude since acquisition.
It's absolutely grown, but the concept of IG was definitely "de-prioritized".
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
It's a crying shame that instagram "won" the photo war, because it is straight up impossible to search / filter through.
Single handedly created a lot of issues for anyone maintaining old cars…
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It sucks for passionate hobbyists, but photography is first and foremost an industry.
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.
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).
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.
For example: https://www.furtrack.com/index/species:fennec_fox
Tens, hundreds of photos for each suit, but almost no views.
Sadly social media has very much taken over for casual viewing.
It was atrocious.