At the beginning of 2021 I completely move my life away from facebooks ecosystem. As a hobbies photographer I moved from Instagram to Flickr, I wish I had done it earlier!
Flickr as a tool is very focused on creators. Once you start using it you realize that the company isn't optimizing for clicks and content consumption. This results in a product and community who’s standard of quality is leagues ahead of anything else one the internet. The idea of “an influence” just doesn’t exist within Flickr. It actually reminds me a lot of the internet before the FAANG monopolies.
They’ve identified a niche in the market and they are now striving to serve that niche the best they can. IMO Flicker is a radical tech company operating complete counter to the omnipresent hyper growth “conquered the world” mindset that pervades tech. I think they would make a good case study of how to build an online community that doesn’t try to optimize for engagement.
Doesn't sound like a successful or even self-sustaining online community though:
> In 2019, SmugMug started deleting Flickr images of free users, except for the newest 1,000 and Creative Commons images.
> User Frank Michel estimated that the site had lost 63% of its images as a result. In 2020, SmugMug increased the fee for a Pro account to $60 per year, saying that the site was still losing money.
> It would appear that an old community of professional photographers is keeping the site alive. Unless SmugMug can sell Flickr to a bigger company or come up with a new and revolutionary feature, however, the site's remaining years may be few...
Flickr was a failed video game that turned a feature into a product. For all those that say you can't pivot this raducally I would say sometimes you can.
Yea Flickr is awesome. The community is just other people who love photography, nothing more. It’s almost entirely positive and welcoming. The site is also a joy to use. A rarity in today’s social network world.
It doesn't feel that much different to me. It's bloated with trackware and adware and overclever operability-breaking cruft just like any other site now.
I also moved away from Facebook. Moved my photos to a Photoprism instance on a VPS synced between all my devices with Nextcloud. Couldn't be happier. And I'm not paying Flickr's crazy fee of $60/year just to host some photos.
I don't fully remember the details, but my understanding is that the thing that most hurt Flickr was internal Yahoo politics around mobile apps.
The Flickr team were understandably very keen to get a great mobile app released - but Yahoo had a separate division (I think called "Connected Life") which had the internal monopoly on mobile development - and the Flickr team weren't allowed to release their own application independently of that team.
Simon is correct. There are a few Quora threads about this with information from insiders. Kellan Elliot-McCrea has the most complete answers about the failure to jump to mobile:
And here's another thread, started by a former Yahoo executive, Ravi Dronamraju, with lots of replies from the founders of various acquired startups (del.icio.us, Flickr, MyBlogLog, etc). It is very illuminating. They're showing you in public what the discussion was often like in private.
Butterfield (one of the founders of Flickr, and later, Slack) is quite a character.
He and Caterina (Fake, the other co-founder of Flickr) were working on a game, a so-called "Game Never Ending" when they realized that they needed to come up with a way for people to store screenshots and share them. Thus, Flickr was born (this is why some URLs in Flickr had ".gne" extensions).
Yahoo acquired Flicker in 2005, and a few years later, both Butterfield and Fake left.
Butterfield then went back to his game. In the process of developing the game, he realized that he needed a good, reliable chat system: and hence Slack was born.
I wonder if he's back working on the game, which, really seems like a "game never ending" for him...
I interviewed for an engineer role at Flickr right after they were acquired by Yahoo. It was a full day grueling interview in one of the San Jose towers with all the originals, Cal, Allspaw, Kellan, etc.
The last interview was with Stewart. He walked in with his laptop and pulled up my resume and saw that I was from Texas. He asked if I'd ever been to Marfa. He then asked if I'd ever been to El Paso. He then asked if I'd ever heard the song El Paso by Marty Robbins. We then sat there and listened to El Paso for the entire song. Then we made some more chit-chat and that was the end of my interview.
I didn't get the gig but I did find out my flight back to DFW was first class so that was nice.
I had a (very) small part in it -- in 2001, I was chatting with Caterina, and recommended the book "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse. She then recommended it to Stewart, who found in it at least one of his inspirations for GNE.
Did you know that Flickr actually started out as an online multiplayer game, with file sharing as one if its features. The game flopped, but the file sharing bit was redeveloped into Flickr. Some of the files used to have .GNE in their url's, with GNE standing for 'Game Never Ending' which was the same of the game. See https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending for reference.
Looks like the game is going to be ending soon though...just remembered I'm a paid member, better go cancel that.
Stewart Butterfield, one of the founders, then went on to give the MMO thing another shot, starting one called Glitch in 2009. In 2012, it was deemed unprofitable, and they pivoted, re-developing their internal communication tools into Slack, which was wildly successful.
There are a couple of threads here that argue Marissa Mayer was the problem. I don't think that can be true.
Mayer took the reins at Yahoo in 2012.
Facebook had crushed Flickr in desktop-shared photos by 2009 or so, and over 2010-2012 or so, Instagram had created a whole new photo experience for mobile that Flickr missed. Instagram was acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012.
Mayer may or may not have exacerbated problems with Flickr. I don't actually know. But there's no way she was the precipitating factor.
Some of the posters blaming her are linking to articles that don't even mention her. The article just happens to use a photo of Mayer because she was the CEO at the time Flickr was sold to SmugMug.
Blaming Marissa Mayer for everything to do with Yahoo really pisses me off. Yahoo was a sinking ship, Mayer tried to save it, she couldn't. The obsession with blaming her feels extremely sexist to me. Regardless of whether it is sexist, people need to lay off of her. Blame is a boring, pathetic game that silently drowns and shuts down the minds of its participants over time. Sometimes people are good in a situation, sometimes they ain't. And sometimes the best person can't save a truly messed up place. I don't understand why this is so difficult to understand.
Flickr is great. With a modest yearly fee I get unlimited storage to back up all my pictures. With one click I can generate a URL for any album to share it. Phone pictures are backed up automatically: I take a picture, it gets copied to Flickr.
I’m not sure I understand the article. I don’t see the fact that Flickr is not Instagram to be a disadvantage.
The UI is bad and always was bad. But it’s easy to upload a whole directory of images at once, and they have an API.
MORE: Every now and then I go there just to browse the public photographs. There’s way too much over-processed fantasy-type imagery for my taste, but also invariably some great stuff, I’m always impressed by the talent of the photographers there.
It's funny how the article glosses over smugmug and almost make them sound like some company that didn't know about this space. Smugmug was there from the beginning and always was the "better flickr", except they did not have (or only very limited, don't quite remember) free accounts. Now smugmug was never aiming to create a social network, but instead wanted to create a website for photographers to exhibit and share their photos. IIRC they grew slowly and never had big VC investments, but are definitely very good at what they do, it's just not a photo sharing service for the masses.
Flickr is great when, and arguably designed for, uploading photos from your computer. This after you dumped your DSLR's photos and edited them. The primary source of photos is now a phone, so services designed around that fare better.
Also, the professional photographer market doesn't really want to share all of their photos to everyone. SmugMug was better at allowing a photographer to control access to their photos and charge for access. Then the photographer puts a few up on Insta for publicity and advertising. Flickr was kind of caught in the middle, really designed for the pro-sumer DSLR owner, who are disappearing.
I use flickr as a member of a community that is a very niche subset of photography which still has a home there. The best thing about flickr as a user is that it's somewhat low-profile these days. However there are numerous aspects of the UI that result in a frustrating UX:
- Ads injected when clicking through photos of a gallery in carousel mode
- Slow page loads
- Pages seem to have their own discrete loading system (some redundant web app nonsense) that often hangs indefinitely until the page is refreshed at which point it loads in ~2 seconds flat
- Very limited ability to search and filter gallery content (in order to see most-liked photos, one must search the site by user then select "sort by: interesting" from an almost hidden menu, but even then it's somewhat randomly sorted by like count
- One must open the inspector to get the raw image url: if I can't simply right-click > save as... images from your website, kindly go fuck yourself; it takes extra effort to undo this feature which is default to all browsers new and old
However I LOVE that they continue to paginate galleries instead of implementing infinite scrolling which is something I hate most about modern web design. Kudos to them for that.
I have some passing awareness of Flickr. I worked a while at 500px. What I heard at the time was that photographers put their good work on Flickr, everything into Google photos, and their best examples on 500px.
I also remember (IIRC) that Flickr did a site redesign going white background rather than the 'light table' black background. I'm not their target user but that would have ended it for me.
My conclusion would be that Flickr could have co-existed with Google photos serving a more active/engaged audience but not if they want to have the same brand (most used, approachable white background, etc).
Used Flickr for years. Then Yahoo came along. Then the T&C's changed, transferring ownership of the photos to Flickr, not even attributing the photographers. Then they introduced fees.
I've not uploaded anything since Yahoo bought them.
What happened to Flickr? Marissa Mayer. She counted user experience as one of her core skills. She revamped Flickr's user experience. When she was done the site was unusable. I think she realized it, because along with releasing the new UX she compensated for its suckiness by upping free storage to 1TB. A couple of takeaways: (1) A lot of people who think they are good at UX, aren't. (2) When people in power make mistakes they rarely admit it or undoes their "improvements".
I think Flickr just never figured out what it was for.
I got whiplash from their spastic business decisions. At first it was unlimited storage, and then it became paid storage. It was good for a while and I paid, and then they released the 1TB plan which made my pro plan pointless (and IIRC they promised it’d stay that way forever), so I cancelled the pro plan, and then the next year they reneged and decided to limit the number of photos and started deleting things. Back and forth and back and forth. The end result is I couldn’t rely on Flickr to keep my pictures or even tell me whether I should pay or not, and if so what for.
The other major issue IMO was back when Flickr suddenly decided that “Flickr is for photos” and started actively blacklisting all artwork from search, with no clear definition of the lines between all the massive gray areas this idea opens up, like manually modified photos, digitally modified photos, photos of art, and pure art. I was using Flickr for both pure photos, and mixed photo-art, and pure art. Having a bunch of my images pulled down with very poor justification was pretty demotivating.
I don’t think UI/UX is in the top 3 reasons why I stopped actively using Flickr.
I often think Marissa Mayer would have been great as COO. Not so much as a CEO or Product Designer.
I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google.
In some sense it wasn't just Marissa, it was also the board's fault.
The same thing that happened to JC Penney (Ron Johnson). Buying a big name that was lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time with the right idea for the right company doesn't mean you magically get their success.
I know it's unhealthy, but I harbor a fantasy in which the modest and user-loving folks from SmugMug[0] pivot Flickr into an all-encompassing portal system a la iMode[1] and drive the productivity vampire Slack[2] out of business, ideally leaving Mr Butterfield a few dollars shy of gull-wing doors[3].
Can confirm that SmugMug and Flickr people love their users and customers. Every single person I interacted with during my time there cared a great deal about the people and photos the service supported. Most people there were into photography themselves as well at some level (personally or professionally).
After all this time, money, and engineering talent, they lack basic features like "Give me a URL to all the photos I (or any user) have tagged with X" that flickr has pretty much had since the neolithic era. Instagram is still basically a toy app that was lucky enough not to be mismanaged to death. Current flickr management has done what they can, but as a product flickr missed out because Yahoo never met a good idea that they didn't fail to execute on.
A lot of people are blaming Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer, changing pricing, missing the boat on mobile, but I'm not convinced the model would have ever worked.
I don't see a specific period of time mentioned in the article which was the death blow for myself and a lot of colleagues; at one point in time instead of restricting it to amount, they restricted access to original size uploads on free accounts. Not just to viewers but content owners as well.
There was a mad scramble of script writing to get all your originals downloaded before the magic cutoff date (I have some laying around somewhere), it was one of my first interactions with python if i recall correctly. People such as myself were naive and had only Flickr storing all our originals - this was our storage method.
It was at that point we all moved on to whatever else having had the scare of using the service in our minds, leaving the friends who had Pro accounts (you could gift them to people back then, it was neat) stranded without an audience. Probably Instagram, back in the beginning IG prided themselves on iPhone-only high quality (no web, no Android) which was sort of the what Flickr Pro users were using anyways.
It seems to me that it's comparing apples and oranges. I use Instagram because everybody else uses Instagram. I use Flickr, because I'm into photography and I don't mean Iphone or Android photography. I mean photography in general.
Instagram is a mobile app. End of story. There is some web/desktop whatever, but it's a joke. I do most of the image manipulation on my laptop/desktop, so I want something that works there. I want to share a full sized result, not a 1080px preview. Mobile app is a welcomed bonus.
Instagram is not a site for photographers. It's an image centric social network. Photographers can use it to reach wider audience, but besides that it has zero features geared towards photography as such. It works for exactly 3 (yes, three!) image sizes and doesn't even show EXIF data.
Flickr was perfectly fine for years after the Yahoo! buyout that really made no change besides mandating the usage of a Yahoo! account to log in. I still have my Yahoo! email used just for that (unlike then-competitor hotmail, Yahoo! accounts didn't self-destruct after two weeks of inactivity).
I am a paying Flickr customer but only begrudgingly so. Part of it is that Flickr lives in a somewhat weird no-mans land where it is bad for photographers but also bad for casual users.
As a casual user to drop my photos anywhere Google Photos is just so much better. It identifies people and things pretty well, the upload is extremely well integrated into my phone and it is absolutely a no-brainer to have stuff there. Flickr's Android app is slow and clunky, for many years it was extremely bad at actually loading images (taking forever) and is missing all the features.
As a pro-user it is missing customizability that I could have a "professional profile" and it seems all the good and useful organizational features are in a different UI that's legacy and hasn't been updated ever since I started using the site (no new UI but also zero new features).
The whole "deleting photos" thing is also quite bad. While I obviously understand that SmugMug had to pull the rug because they can't bleed money like Yahoo was obviously doing it just left a bad taste in my mouth and the improvements that they did is mostly "look we made a movie". Which is fine and all and there's space for that for sure but maybe also improve the site?
I would like to like Flickr much more than I do. It feels like it had so much potential and a good community but now it is entirely a ghost town where you post to groups only to have comments show up saying "seen in group XYZ". There's still some extremely good photography on Flickr and it is not quite overrun my trends as Instagram seems to be but ehhh, I just wish it wouldn't be so unpleasant.
[+] [-] pythonic_hell|4 years ago|reply
Flickr as a tool is very focused on creators. Once you start using it you realize that the company isn't optimizing for clicks and content consumption. This results in a product and community who’s standard of quality is leagues ahead of anything else one the internet. The idea of “an influence” just doesn’t exist within Flickr. It actually reminds me a lot of the internet before the FAANG monopolies.
They’ve identified a niche in the market and they are now striving to serve that niche the best they can. IMO Flicker is a radical tech company operating complete counter to the omnipresent hyper growth “conquered the world” mindset that pervades tech. I think they would make a good case study of how to build an online community that doesn’t try to optimize for engagement.
[+] [-] ianlevesque|4 years ago|reply
> In 2019, SmugMug started deleting Flickr images of free users, except for the newest 1,000 and Creative Commons images.
> User Frank Michel estimated that the site had lost 63% of its images as a result. In 2020, SmugMug increased the fee for a Pro account to $60 per year, saying that the site was still losing money.
> It would appear that an old community of professional photographers is keeping the site alive. Unless SmugMug can sell Flickr to a bigger company or come up with a new and revolutionary feature, however, the site's remaining years may be few...
[+] [-] ipaddr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yesimahuman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SilasX|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yosito|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonw|4 years ago|reply
The Flickr team were understandably very keen to get a great mobile app released - but Yahoo had a separate division (I think called "Connected Life") which had the internal monopoly on mobile development - and the Flickr team weren't allowed to release their own application independently of that team.
Then Instagram happened.
[+] [-] neilk|4 years ago|reply
https://qr.ae/pGzfWU
https://qr.ae/pGzfWd
And here's another thread, started by a former Yahoo executive, Ravi Dronamraju, with lots of replies from the founders of various acquired startups (del.icio.us, Flickr, MyBlogLog, etc). It is very illuminating. They're showing you in public what the discussion was often like in private.
https://qr.ae/pGzfiw
[+] [-] kaichanvong|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1024core|4 years ago|reply
He and Caterina (Fake, the other co-founder of Flickr) were working on a game, a so-called "Game Never Ending" when they realized that they needed to come up with a way for people to store screenshots and share them. Thus, Flickr was born (this is why some URLs in Flickr had ".gne" extensions).
Yahoo acquired Flicker in 2005, and a few years later, both Butterfield and Fake left.
Butterfield then went back to his game. In the process of developing the game, he realized that he needed a good, reliable chat system: and hence Slack was born.
I wonder if he's back working on the game, which, really seems like a "game never ending" for him...
[+] [-] 0x640x6D|4 years ago|reply
The last interview was with Stewart. He walked in with his laptop and pulled up my resume and saw that I was from Texas. He asked if I'd ever been to Marfa. He then asked if I'd ever been to El Paso. He then asked if I'd ever heard the song El Paso by Marty Robbins. We then sat there and listened to El Paso for the entire song. Then we made some more chit-chat and that was the end of my interview.
I didn't get the gig but I did find out my flight back to DFW was first class so that was nice.
[+] [-] dmd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FireInsight|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grumblepeet|4 years ago|reply
Looks like the game is going to be ending soon though...just remembered I'm a paid member, better go cancel that.
[+] [-] greyface-|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] neilk|4 years ago|reply
Mayer took the reins at Yahoo in 2012.
Facebook had crushed Flickr in desktop-shared photos by 2009 or so, and over 2010-2012 or so, Instagram had created a whole new photo experience for mobile that Flickr missed. Instagram was acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012.
Mayer may or may not have exacerbated problems with Flickr. I don't actually know. But there's no way she was the precipitating factor.
Some of the posters blaming her are linking to articles that don't even mention her. The article just happens to use a photo of Mayer because she was the CEO at the time Flickr was sold to SmugMug.
[+] [-] leoh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overeater|4 years ago|reply
Wait, isn't that just another way of saying that she sold Flicker to SmugMug? If so, she sounds very blamable.
[+] [-] leephillips|4 years ago|reply
I’m not sure I understand the article. I don’t see the fact that Flickr is not Instagram to be a disadvantage.
The UI is bad and always was bad. But it’s easy to upload a whole directory of images at once, and they have an API.
MORE: Every now and then I go there just to browse the public photographs. There’s way too much over-processed fantasy-type imagery for my taste, but also invariably some great stuff, I’m always impressed by the talent of the photographers there.
[+] [-] ipaddr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjr225|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cycomanic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mthoms|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jboy55|4 years ago|reply
Flickr is great when, and arguably designed for, uploading photos from your computer. This after you dumped your DSLR's photos and edited them. The primary source of photos is now a phone, so services designed around that fare better.
Also, the professional photographer market doesn't really want to share all of their photos to everyone. SmugMug was better at allowing a photographer to control access to their photos and charge for access. Then the photographer puts a few up on Insta for publicity and advertising. Flickr was kind of caught in the middle, really designed for the pro-sumer DSLR owner, who are disappearing.
[+] [-] nullifidian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stemlord|4 years ago|reply
- Ads injected when clicking through photos of a gallery in carousel mode
- Slow page loads
- Pages seem to have their own discrete loading system (some redundant web app nonsense) that often hangs indefinitely until the page is refreshed at which point it loads in ~2 seconds flat
- Very limited ability to search and filter gallery content (in order to see most-liked photos, one must search the site by user then select "sort by: interesting" from an almost hidden menu, but even then it's somewhat randomly sorted by like count
- One must open the inspector to get the raw image url: if I can't simply right-click > save as... images from your website, kindly go fuck yourself; it takes extra effort to undo this feature which is default to all browsers new and old
However I LOVE that they continue to paginate galleries instead of implementing infinite scrolling which is something I hate most about modern web design. Kudos to them for that.
[+] [-] karmakaze|4 years ago|reply
I also remember (IIRC) that Flickr did a site redesign going white background rather than the 'light table' black background. I'm not their target user but that would have ended it for me.
My conclusion would be that Flickr could have co-existed with Google photos serving a more active/engaged audience but not if they want to have the same brand (most used, approachable white background, etc).
[+] [-] Jenk|4 years ago|reply
I've not uploaded anything since Yahoo bought them.
[+] [-] AlexandrB|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcpt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpark|4 years ago|reply
I would love to know what you’re talking about here.
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] epa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bborud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petilon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahart|4 years ago|reply
I got whiplash from their spastic business decisions. At first it was unlimited storage, and then it became paid storage. It was good for a while and I paid, and then they released the 1TB plan which made my pro plan pointless (and IIRC they promised it’d stay that way forever), so I cancelled the pro plan, and then the next year they reneged and decided to limit the number of photos and started deleting things. Back and forth and back and forth. The end result is I couldn’t rely on Flickr to keep my pictures or even tell me whether I should pay or not, and if so what for.
The other major issue IMO was back when Flickr suddenly decided that “Flickr is for photos” and started actively blacklisting all artwork from search, with no clear definition of the lines between all the massive gray areas this idea opens up, like manually modified photos, digitally modified photos, photos of art, and pure art. I was using Flickr for both pure photos, and mixed photo-art, and pure art. Having a bunch of my images pulled down with very poor justification was pretty demotivating.
I don’t think UI/UX is in the top 3 reasons why I stopped actively using Flickr.
[+] [-] ksec|4 years ago|reply
I remember Yahoo had another candidate that planned to turn Yahoo into a media company. Which even at the time I thought was a much better idea and direction. Instead the broad choose Mayer, and try to compete head on with Google.
In some sense it wasn't just Marissa, it was also the board's fault.
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biztos|4 years ago|reply
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/smugmug-acquires-flickr
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield
[3]: https://youtu.be/0oV4IVy8tvE
[+] [-] shostack|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mullingitover|4 years ago|reply
After all this time, money, and engineering talent, they lack basic features like "Give me a URL to all the photos I (or any user) have tagged with X" that flickr has pretty much had since the neolithic era. Instagram is still basically a toy app that was lucky enough not to be mismanaged to death. Current flickr management has done what they can, but as a product flickr missed out because Yahoo never met a good idea that they didn't fail to execute on.
[+] [-] myko|4 years ago|reply
Bizarre considering they have some of the finest iOS developers in the world
[+] [-] severak_cz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ringworld|4 years ago|reply
There was a mad scramble of script writing to get all your originals downloaded before the magic cutoff date (I have some laying around somewhere), it was one of my first interactions with python if i recall correctly. People such as myself were naive and had only Flickr storing all our originals - this was our storage method.
It was at that point we all moved on to whatever else having had the scare of using the service in our minds, leaving the friends who had Pro accounts (you could gift them to people back then, it was neat) stranded without an audience. Probably Instagram, back in the beginning IG prided themselves on iPhone-only high quality (no web, no Android) which was sort of the what Flickr Pro users were using anyways.
[+] [-] mfranc42|4 years ago|reply
Instagram is a mobile app. End of story. There is some web/desktop whatever, but it's a joke. I do most of the image manipulation on my laptop/desktop, so I want something that works there. I want to share a full sized result, not a 1080px preview. Mobile app is a welcomed bonus.
Instagram is not a site for photographers. It's an image centric social network. Photographers can use it to reach wider audience, but besides that it has zero features geared towards photography as such. It works for exactly 3 (yes, three!) image sizes and doesn't even show EXIF data.
[+] [-] tomcooks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|4 years ago|reply
The real damage came later.
[+] [-] LeonidasXIV|4 years ago|reply
As a casual user to drop my photos anywhere Google Photos is just so much better. It identifies people and things pretty well, the upload is extremely well integrated into my phone and it is absolutely a no-brainer to have stuff there. Flickr's Android app is slow and clunky, for many years it was extremely bad at actually loading images (taking forever) and is missing all the features.
As a pro-user it is missing customizability that I could have a "professional profile" and it seems all the good and useful organizational features are in a different UI that's legacy and hasn't been updated ever since I started using the site (no new UI but also zero new features).
The whole "deleting photos" thing is also quite bad. While I obviously understand that SmugMug had to pull the rug because they can't bleed money like Yahoo was obviously doing it just left a bad taste in my mouth and the improvements that they did is mostly "look we made a movie". Which is fine and all and there's space for that for sure but maybe also improve the site?
I would like to like Flickr much more than I do. It feels like it had so much potential and a good community but now it is entirely a ghost town where you post to groups only to have comments show up saying "seen in group XYZ". There's still some extremely good photography on Flickr and it is not quite overrun my trends as Instagram seems to be but ehhh, I just wish it wouldn't be so unpleasant.