3 ms·

This. Flickr was always closer to deviantART / 500px and going after the 'carefully composed photo for its own merits' market than the casual photo sharing spac

by niftich 10y ago

This. Flickr was always closer to deviantART / 500px and going after the 'carefully composed photo for its own merits' market than the casual photo sharing space.

mc32 10y ago
Yes, there were and are many groups like that with curated content. But the great majority are photo buckets with no curation. That said, it was always "social". People made do with the tools Flickr gave them. But the tools were left to wither and were never updated or given finesse knobs. Then, when "good" phone cameras became mainstream[1] Flickr didn't take that and run with it to accommodate its users who were now using their camera phones as either their main cameras or at least took a good chunk of their pictures. One reason Flickr continues is it has a core of dedicated users, some of whom have tried alternatives but who come back because the others have very few tools for photographers to use (by tools I mean ways to organize, comment, tag, favorite, curate, groups, galleries, pool, moderate, etc. [1] The NYT's Damon Winter's getting recognition on photos taken with an iPhone in 2010 should have been the aha moment, but it wasn't: See http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-tool-to-tell-a-war-story/ http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-t...
- ghaff 10y ago
  >some of whom have tried alternatives but who come back because the others have very few tools for photographers to use I guess the evidence suggests that "social site for prosumer photographers" is probably rather a niche and therefore hard to make a great business out of it--at least at scale. There are certainly flickr alternatives like SmugMug but none are SV unicorn-like businesses. You're right that flickr largely missed the boat to appeal to casual shooters although I expect a focus on those would have tended to drive their core audience away. I do post photos on Facebook but I use it in a complete different way than flickr.

by niftich 10y ago

This. Flickr was always closer to deviantART / 500px and going after the 'carefully composed photo for its own merits' market than the casual photo sharing space.

mc32 10y ago

Yes, there were and are many groups like that with curated content. But the great majority are photo buckets with no curation. That said, it was always "social". People made do with the tools Flickr gave them. But the tools were left to wither and were never updated or given finesse knobs. Then, when "good" phone cameras became mainstream[1] Flickr didn't take that and run with it to accommodate its users who were now using their camera phones as either their main cameras or at least took a good chunk of their pictures. One reason Flickr continues is it has a core of dedicated users, some of whom have tried alternatives but who come back because the others have very few tools for photographers to use (by tools I mean ways to organize, comment, tag, favorite, curate, groups, galleries, pool, moderate, etc. [1] The NYT's Damon Winter's getting recognition on photos taken with an iPhone in 2010 should have been the aha moment, but it wasn't: See http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-tool-to-tell-a-war-story/ http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-t...

ghaff 10y ago
>some of whom have tried alternatives but who come back because the others have very few tools for photographers to use I guess the evidence suggests that "social site for prosumer photographers" is probably rather a niche and therefore hard to make a great business out of it--at least at scale. There are certainly flickr alternatives like SmugMug but none are SV unicorn-like businesses. You're right that flickr largely missed the boat to appeal to casual shooters although I expect a focus on those would have tended to drive their core audience away. I do post photos on Facebook but I use it in a complete different way than flickr.