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I've paid for a Flickr pro account for a few years now. Ironically, I first got on Flickr when Yahoo Photos shut down and they forcefully migrated me to Flickr.

by ja27 16y ago

I've paid for a Flickr pro account for a few years now. Ironically, I first got on Flickr when Yahoo Photos shut down and they forcefully migrated me to Flickr. But I'm letting my pro account expire this month. I've been using Flickr for 2 main purposes: sharing photos with friends and backing up all my photos. It hasn't been great for either. No matter how many guest passes and invites I mail friends, most of them only look at the photos I put on Facebook. Facebook keeps improving their photo service - removing album limits, increasing resolution. I can't name a single new Flickr feature in the past 3 years that's impacted me. For backing up, it's really not very convenient, especially if I had to restore. I've moved to rotating offsite hard drives a while ago. I do still enjoy some of the social aspects of Flickr groups, for general photography and related interests. That's enough to possibly keep me active there as a free user, but in general the quality of the average Flickr group is pretty low. It really depends on the group admins and Flickr doesn't offer any incentive for them. Wouldn't it be easy to offer free Pro accounts to the admins of the top 1% of Flickr groups? Or some swag? Or anything? Then there's the fact that every time I login there I cringe when I realize I'm using my ancient Yahoo id that's been discarded for every other purpose.

thwarted 16y ago
Facebook keeps improving their photo service - removing album limits, increasing resolution. Flickr both doesn't limit how many photos can be in a set or collection and provides the original resolution (at least for the pro account, I don't remember what the free account's limits are). These "improvements" Facebook is making is just catching up to flickr's base functionality. Obviously, Facebook may be more compelling to use for it's (monetarily) free price if you just want to post photos for your close friends to look at. I personally get tired of the photos of people's lame afternoons on Facebook, there's a lot more interesting content being posted to flickr, and I don't necessarily need to friend someone to be exposed to it or find it. I find flickr better for managing photos. It's the internet, it like one click to get anywhere. I've settled that if people don't bother to click through from Facebook (where my flickr photos get posted to my wall as thumbnails) to actually view the photos on flickr where they are public (requiring no account), they aren't actually interested in seeing it.
- ja27 16y ago
  For the most part I like the Flickr UI. It takes a bit to understand photostreams, sets, collections, and group pools, and the online organizer is a little different. But for the most part it's efficient and is broken a lot less of the time that Facebook's photos. But my average friend that would go look at my Flickr photos can't figure out how to navigate or download full-resolution. (That's mostly other parents.) Leaving Flickr pro does mean losing letting other people download full-resolution of my photos, but I can only think of a handful of photos where that impacts me. I can upload those other places for free. It does mean only seeing my last 200 photos in my photostream, but apparently all my photos already added to groups will remain visible in the group pools. There's some other pro benefits like number of sets, set size, video length, etc. that I don't think will bother me at all. I think they're in a tough spot of giving too much to free users and not enough benefit to Pro users. I can't argue with their price though. I've considered dropping pro before but $29 for the year is an easy payment to make. The last two years I've just shrugged and payed it rather than deal with it.
- eftpotrm 16y ago
  My (non-photography) friends look more at my photos on Facebook they're where I get the majority of personal feedback. Flickr is a much better source for me of reference material and examples when I'm looking for inspiration on how to approach a subject - not as a straight copy but to stop me ever further refining my old work. It's also overwhelmingly where I get unsolicited usage enquiries from - got one yesterday as it happens. If what you want is social sharing with your pre-existing network, I agree - use Facebook. I do. If you want a service more geared for photographers, Flickr is better IMHO.
brlewis 16y ago
My photo site, OurDoings, offers two solutions to your "friends don't look at photos I mail" problem. First, you can send in seconds an email message in html with thumbnails of all your new photos. They don't have to leave their email to see if interesting (to them) photos are part of this update. Second, you can in one click create an album on Facebook for a given month and send that month's photos to it. The album has a link back to the month page on OurDoings where they can see the photos in a nicer format if they so choose. http://ourdoings.com/ http://ourdoings.com/

by ja27 16y ago

thwarted 16y ago

Facebook keeps improving their photo service - removing album limits, increasing resolution. Flickr both doesn't limit how many photos can be in a set or collection and provides the original resolution (at least for the pro account, I don't remember what the free account's limits are). These "improvements" Facebook is making is just catching up to flickr's base functionality. Obviously, Facebook may be more compelling to use for it's (monetarily) free price if you just want to post photos for your close friends to look at. I personally get tired of the photos of people's lame afternoons on Facebook, there's a lot more interesting content being posted to flickr, and I don't necessarily need to friend someone to be exposed to it or find it. I find flickr better for managing photos. It's the internet, it like one click to get anywhere. I've settled that if people don't bother to click through from Facebook (where my flickr photos get posted to my wall as thumbnails) to actually view the photos on flickr where they are public (requiring no account), they aren't actually interested in seeing it.

ja27 16y ago
For the most part I like the Flickr UI. It takes a bit to understand photostreams, sets, collections, and group pools, and the online organizer is a little different. But for the most part it's efficient and is broken a lot less of the time that Facebook's photos. But my average friend that would go look at my Flickr photos can't figure out how to navigate or download full-resolution. (That's mostly other parents.) Leaving Flickr pro does mean losing letting other people download full-resolution of my photos, but I can only think of a handful of photos where that impacts me. I can upload those other places for free. It does mean only seeing my last 200 photos in my photostream, but apparently all my photos already added to groups will remain visible in the group pools. There's some other pro benefits like number of sets, set size, video length, etc. that I don't think will bother me at all. I think they're in a tough spot of giving too much to free users and not enough benefit to Pro users. I can't argue with their price though. I've considered dropping pro before but $29 for the year is an easy payment to make. The last two years I've just shrugged and payed it rather than deal with it.
eftpotrm 16y ago
My (non-photography) friends look more at my photos on Facebook they're where I get the majority of personal feedback. Flickr is a much better source for me of reference material and examples when I'm looking for inspiration on how to approach a subject - not as a straight copy but to stop me ever further refining my old work. It's also overwhelmingly where I get unsolicited usage enquiries from - got one yesterday as it happens. If what you want is social sharing with your pre-existing network, I agree - use Facebook. I do. If you want a service more geared for photographers, Flickr is better IMHO.

brlewis 16y ago

My photo site, OurDoings, offers two solutions to your "friends don't look at photos I mail" problem. First, you can send in seconds an email message in html with thumbnails of all your new photos. They don't have to leave their email to see if interesting (to them) photos are part of this update. Second, you can in one click create an album on Facebook for a given month and send that month's photos to it. The album has a link back to the month page on OurDoings where they can see the photos in a nicer format if they so choose. http://ourdoings.com/ http://ourdoings.com/