I'd be really curious to hear from someone who was part of that loyal following. This really doesn't grab me — but how does it look to someone who used to be a core user?
Flickr was not, to me, a place to dump photos. Rather it was a showcase of a kind, where my most meaningful photos could be put on display. Maybe picassa was a dumping ground, but not Flickr.
The initial refresh was appreciated but confusing, and my use of Flickr declined. It took ages before any decent app at all was available for the Android and iPhone platforms. They fumbled the Facebook app.
Recently my use of Flickr has picked up again, but I've started to consider other services. With this new breath of fresh air perhaps that consideration will be stalled, maybe indefinitely. It's a competitive landscape.
I'm not at my photographic peak these days, but the photos are still meaningful and become more so over time.
The alternatives are not good. I tried a few but nothing that feels as easy to use/look as flickr. I'm still searching.
I'm generally fine with flickr even if I don't really love it. I use the jfriedl Lightroom plug-in and that lets me use flickr pretty effortlessly as an online repository and sharing site for all the photos I really care about. (And in so doing, serve as a really worst case backup although my raw files are backed up in a few different ways.
For me my Flickr is my story of the past ten years: moving to the UK, share housing, meeting my husband, getting married, many fun holidays, having my son. What's important to me is the curation of my story, so features around automatically uploading photos and making albums are not important to me.
The other thing I used to like about Flickr was thoughtful community of people who created beautiful photos. There are still many beautiful photos to look through on there, but to be honest it's less important to me now than it used to be. I'm not really looking to reach out and make new friends in the way I was in 2004. My early photos were almost all public. My current ones are almost all friends and family only.
I probably would be open to considering another service if there was somewhere else I could keep my memories that was as good, but the people who are interested in the detail of my life are already on Flickr and the service is good enough that I can't really be bothered to move. I don't mind that it's not where the cool kids hang out.
- Flickr was slow. I can't stand slow services and over time I tend to avoid these services even though I want to use them.
- I think there was an uptick in photography for me during the decade when digital cameras went from "meh" to "wow". And then suddenly the world was flooded by meaningless beauty when everyone had a good camera (including on their phones) and a bunch of filters.
- I think social websites filled people's need to tell their story. Flickr, to some degree did that for many people. Albeit in a more abstracted, indirect way. With social media there is more immediacty and there is an ephemeral quality to how you communicate.