Yahoo holds a lot of the blame for the death of Flickr, but it would have been in trouble anyway. Flickr was born for a time when a photograph was a rarer thing, and was something you'd put a lot of effort into both creating and curating.
With smartphones, we are all now firehoses of photography, barely clinging on by adding hearts and likes as the images fly past. Carefully adding metadata and curating Flickr-style would be a full-time job for most of us these days.
I guess the closest modern analogue to what Flickr was is Instagram — which is more carefully curated and selective – but Instagram has never cared about quality, and a Flickr that chased the Instagram audience wouldn't really have been Flickr anymore anyway.
There are a lot of photographers out there how enjoy "the old way": putting time into the creation of the photo right at the time of shooting instead of taking the same - or more - time for post processing. Some of these people have retreated to their own sites, because none of the social networks offer the slow, steady, carefully crafted publishing what they'd prefer.
Indeed Flickr was - still could be - a good place for these people. It's a niche market, true, but if the service is fading, you might want to target a group which is currently not targeted by anyone. ( No, 500px is _not_ an alternative; that is a very long discussion, why, approximately summarized by Sarah Marino[1] )
Instead of targeting high profile amateurs, who are already willing to pay for their hobby, Flickr created a mobile app, which, by default, consumes ALL images and video on the device, acts, works and looks too similar to Instagram.
I know growth is god, but it really shouldn't be, especially not in this case. They should have focused on enthusiasts, though it might be too late now.
( I'm just silently noting that maybe they stop making UI changes to the site and make it work without an excessive amount of crappy JS, and instead try to figure out the target market. )
I disagree with this wholeheartedly. Pictures I take with my phone are "in the moment" pictures something like "oh look my son put his pants on his head, that's a keeper". Those I throw on facebook so my mom can check it out... and then i'm done.
But when I pull out my $1500 DSLR, it's not a firehose (well it is, but not what i'm going to publish) I'm going to go through hundreds of pics, pick 20 or so that matter, and then put effort into touching them up... because I shot in RAW just so I could do that.
After you spent literally hours making that photo "just right", that's what I use flikr for. It's also nice to have other photographers find your stuff, and comment on how nice it is.
I think this is just one more point of "if you want to do a startup, look for something owned by Yahoo, and build that"
I don't disagree with you; it's just that those of us with the DSLRs (and the ILCs) are the last holdouts, we're a niche rump of what used to be a mainstream activity. Someone will make a nice life out of creating a service for that niche, but it's not going to be a Yahoo-scale thing.
I would say that's more because Yahoo lacks any real good vision. :)
From what I see (based on this chart -- http://petapixel.com/2015/04/09/this-is-what-the-history-of-...) -- DSLRs and ILCs are "slow but steady" and not crashing too badly. A "niche" for sure. But until smartphones can match the quality of a DSLR in certain situations (low light or zoom for a start) I can see there always being a market for these higher-end amateur / hobbyist type photographers. The category being slaughtered now by smartphones is (obviously) the compact digital.
Flickr's not going to be able to compete at this point with the general social media photography. Why not focus on a market they once had a good handle on and probably isn't going away anytime soon?
Yet another half-assed job by Yahoo. The way I saw it, there was potential in becoming a realtime marketplace for photos of events. With the right interface, you could let a user who happens to capture a newsworthy event to sell his/her photos for good $$, and Yahoo collects a nice chunk of it.
I would go and say that when flickr will be gone we will enter a different era of the web. Flickr has been such a great influence over the years that internet without flickr will be a different internet altogether
I find it difficult to relate to you. I have been an active internet user since 1997 and have never used flickr a lot and don't feel I will miss anything if it goes away. Also, if Flickr is such a seminal piece of property, its usage would have been through the roof which is clearly not the case.
Yes - it was popular during its heydays but now it is just another photo storing/sharing app.
Flickr was the first "web 2.0" site. It was the first social network. It was the first really global photo publishing website. So I agree with heyts above. Flickr repeatedly becomes a shadow of its former self, and that is really very sad. It could have been more, but Yahoo just drove it into the ground - they did it slowly enough however that it did remain relevant for a long time, but it missed just about every boat that came along.
Friendster pre-dated it by 2-3 years, MySpace and Facebook by a year.
I have to agree with product50, I am an avid photographer but Flickr was never compelling for me. I would only ever see it when someone would post a link to Facebook...
According to wikipedia, Facebook was actually started the same month as flickr (Feb. 2004). del.icio.us was another notable "Web 2.0" site that did predate flickr.
It was also one of the first metadata rich photo sets that was publicly available. Prior to every large company seeing data as their primary source of income Flickr had their open data API and a lot of interesting science was done using Flickr's images and metadata.
Unfortunately there's really no equivalent pool of photographic content--including CC and public domain content. If flickr were to shutdown, a huge amount of content would be lost.
I sort of agree with you but in another sense it remained true to its roots as a photo publishing platform, mostly, for amateurs. But the mass market was fine with putting some pics up on facebook. And serious professionals have other markets more explicitly aligned with their needs.
Perhaps this could be a clarion call for volunteers to start transitioning the CC and public domain content to archive.org, assuming Flickr gives enough notice that such a shutdown were to occur.
I think this is a bit of a hyperbole. To me the definitive feature of the internet is the potential it offers in networking services, offering accessibility to great pools of data and serving as a forum to cheaply create networks of value from producers to customers.
In this scope a public repository of photographic data is one embodiment of this potential. Just changing the behaviour of this single embodiment does very little to affect the fabric of the internet.
Maybe there are social bubbles for whom flickr is much more important but if I had to list any number of internet services that I consider markable flickr would have not been on that list.
Ironically, I think the site that has killed the market for commercial photos is Yahoo's other free photo hosting service: Tumblr. Image copyright is now practically a dead letter if you're an amateur.
> Image copyright is now practically a dead letter if you're an amateur.
Why would an amateur care about copyright? The whole point of copyright is to grant a monopoly to a work's creator in order for him to make money. If he's trying to make money, he's not an amateur (viz., someone doing it out of love — hence the word).
An amateur certainly wouldn't care about the market for commercial photos!
If you're an amateur photographer, you don't have the resource to do anything other than occasionally google image search your own stuff and send a few DMCA notices.
Whereas tumblr is built on - literally made out of - the reproduction of images without the permission of the copyright holder.
There's no RIAA or MPAA for photographs that has the clout to force platforms to redesign their systems to pro-actively check for copyright infringement.
(I'm trying to scrupulously avoid saying which side is right here, just describing the situation)
Interesting - it's not an area that I know a lot about. I had just come across a Vancouver company called Copypants (https://www.copypants.com/) that is targeting this issue, (I have no affiliation), and so your comment made me curious.
I agree. My account has grown to over 10,000 photos and videos of my family, from our early dating, wedding, two kids. It's all pretty easily searchable, well-organized, and simple to back up. We've been using it since Bush was in office.
I don't know of any other tool or service that makes it as easy as Flickr does for my wife and I to collectively maintain a library of family photos. I will happily maintain my Flickr Pro subscription for as long as the service stays in business.
I was a heavy Flikr user for quite a long time; until the new laws were pushed (in the UK at least) to allow the likes of google to declare 'untraceable' images as fair game for their own business needs.
It's now too easy for corporation to rip off the work of photographers, so I removed the content I had online, and will only post the odd photo to my G+ these days. Not the 'stream' of stuff I used to do with Flikr back then.
They're laws that don't get enforced because the companies are simply too large and can get away with it. It's more effective and more profitable for the court systems to go after the smaller 'offenders.'
Can anyone recommend a FOSS photo store built on top of AWS or similar cloud hosting/storage?
I'm aware there are a thousand PHP photo library website-in-a-box type solutions. I'm more looking for something that can take advantage of cloud storage such as Amazon's buckets, so the billing increments with the amount of data stored. In an ideal world it would retain max-res files in Glacier, select storage intelligently based on frequency of access, etc etc.
It's for personal use. I'd like to pop something up for our family to archive and share photos. Privately, with the option of publicly sharing.
I haven't run across anything convincingly good. I've put together my own system (that is nowhere near as advanced as what you are suggesting) using a static site generator (jekyll) and a script to sync my image folders to s3 and generate yaml files for the albums. I use lambda/apigateway for the login endpoint and that generates a cloudfront signed cookie for access control to the otherwise static website. It works but I wish I had more time to add features (search, tagging, face detection, etc...). Not really something that i plan on open sourcing though.
The nextcloud/owncloud debacle seems to need a little more time before sinking too much into it.
We are currently using google drive to sync our photo library w/the home server, and share out private links via email when needed. This keeps us from having to maintain an app/server, users/pws for friends and family...etc, and we can take down the private links as needed.
yeah, and it is still marked as NEW in their photo search IU :-|
They want about $280USD per picture of 300dpi, which is waaaaaaaaay overpriced. On Shutterstock, you can get 2 images for $29 with the most expensive plan.
I'm growing weary of trusting the cloud for some things. There are a few photos I actually care about, and right now they're on Flikr. Facebook mangles them, and flikr holds them hostage if I stop paying. I used to keep a local copy, but over the years I've been lazy with copying it as I move machines.
I'm thinking of buying a raspberry pie, and a few extra large SD cards, and just hosting it on the web myself.
I'll miss the social aspects though. It was fun to have the occasional email pop up every now and then from someone commenting on a photo I took 3 years ago.
HDD space is cheap, combine a big one of those with a service like CrashPlan. Even if you do a self hosted solution you want to make sure things are backed up.
The article didn't really clarify the actual reason for me. They cited difficulties against competitive platforms, but is it because
(a) their technology wasn't as good as their competitors
(b) their compensation plans/margins weren't as good as their competitors, or
(c) there really wasn't interest from the photographic company for such a service, and there weren't enough users to keep it viable?
In terms of being a cloud service for photo storage, they can't compete with Google Photos, iCloud and other mobile services that have the benefit of being more deeply integrated and available as a default on their respective platforms.
The social network aspect is obliterated by Instagram, Snapchat and the like.
The photo reselling part I'm not familiar with, but it seems to be lacking in a similar fashion.
In short - their high point was the time when they primarily catered to photographers. All three aspects of the service were useful for that crowd and perhaps if they kept that position and developed advanced features that appeal to that particular crowd, they could have remained strong. But once they started reaching out to the general public, they alienated their original audience and at the same time failed to compete with (originally) smaller services that provided a better experience in each specific field.
They want about $40USD per picture of 72dpi, which is waaaaaaaaay overpriced. On Shutterstock, you can get 2 images for $29 with the most expensive plan (not sure about the resolution, though).
The question is not what Yahoo is killing but what they aren't killing. I'll be surprised if anything is left of Flickr in a few years given the success of competition.
In terms of what might replace Flickr for image-based content, I've been watching (and using) Ello for the past couple of years. The site isn't entirely oriented around galleries of photographs, but does feature graphical content heavily (some fellow writers have griped a bit about this, though I feel only with modest justification).
One interesting feature added in the past few months was a "Buy" button -- a large green dollar sign -- which guides viewers to where they can buy a given user's works. Mostly this seems to link to other services, blogs, Amazon, Etsy, eBay, or related pages, but tying this in more tightly or providing a Flickr-type capability might be something Ello could look at.
I suspect they're familiar with Flickr's offerings, but feedback on what worked (or didn't) with that, or what Ello's missing, could be of interest.
(No stake in the company -- I use the site and pass on regular feedback, praise, and criticisms.)
So sad Yahoo did absolutely nothing with this icon of photography websites. I've been revisiting old photos, and moving them over to my own personal site. It's probably inevitable that one day we'll all get the notice that Flickr is shutting down, and you have X amount of days to save your photos.
My only experience with Flickr was uploading tens of thousands of images with links to my websites for 'link juice' back when Google was stupid and eas(ier) to game. Ah, the good ol days....
Sounds like my use case for Flickr differs a lot from the ones mentioned here. I don't store everything there (Over a terabyte of raw photos etc is not worth publishing;-), only photos I want to publish as an enthusiast photographer and see other photographers photos + talk about them. For that Flickr still trumps over 500px, Facebook* and any other service I've seen. Would've probably quit photography as a hobby multiple times without Flickr.
* Facebook is where other people are and there are some good groups but for really following other photographers it sucks + FB molesting JPEGs is just horrible.
FB molesting JPEGs -> upload them as PNGs, reasonably sized and pray. with a bit of luck, none will be reprocessed into crappy JPEG with highest compression available effectively ruining them (yeah, shame for FB, generally it's a piece of sh_t when it comes to technical quality of the site, albeit much better compared to what bugfest it was few years ago)
Instagram. You can use hashtags to organize your photos similar to Lightroom and tag your friends to keep track of who's in them. I also found out if you use the hidden "Full Ten" filter it retains the original quality.
Instagram is a horrible image portfolio system. It does not offer full res downloads, has zero exif data, extremely limited desktop app. Instagram is a social media app first, and a photo app second.
500px is apparently where all the cool kids go. I use Google Photos.
(500px has a really weird community. The hive mind likes photos edited to have a certain look, and there are lots of random people that show up to like your photos in the hope that you will like theirs, and they'll get popular enough to be featured on the front page. As a result, I don't use it. My friends on G+ are enough sharing for me :)
With smartphones, we are all now firehoses of photography, barely clinging on by adding hearts and likes as the images fly past. Carefully adding metadata and curating Flickr-style would be a full-time job for most of us these days.
I guess the closest modern analogue to what Flickr was is Instagram — which is more carefully curated and selective – but Instagram has never cared about quality, and a Flickr that chased the Instagram audience wouldn't really have been Flickr anymore anyway.