7 ms·

SmugMug emails subscribers with request to find more paying users

66 points by hellisothers 7y ago

kick 7y ago
Why AWS? It'd doubtlessly be cheaper to throw Flickr onto dedicated servers (by a ton). It would also probably help if they freed the source code of Flickr, so others could contribute and make it lighter to run. A site like Flickr is exactly what you want to keep as far away from AWS as possible.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  I agreed. You dont even need crazy SSDs for all the data. You can have spin disks which have gotten cheaper for TB of data for the older images and SSDs for the cached ones (most recently accessed) and voila.
  - basch 7y ago
    For write once archiving, bluray is an option too. Although who knows how long the discs last.
- kibibyte 7y ago
  SmugMug seems to be hosted on AWS (based on doing a DNS lookup and seeing who owns that IP). I wouldn't be surprised if moving it all to AWS was the path of least resistance to an engineering team that understands AWS more than managing a dedicated hardware fleet.
  - paranoidrobot 7y ago
    The SmugMug team were the first people I remember seeing use S3 for more than a 'hello world' project. This blog entry from 2006[1] is only 13 years old, but feels like it should be older. Back then, putting that much data for a publicly accessible site was considered pretty insane. [1] https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-grail/ https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-...
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Older how? S3 was invented in 2006. What was S3 used for if not for hosting website data?
      - sct202 7y ago
        At the place I work we transfer files with one of our vendors via s3.
      - paranoidrobot 7y ago
        > Older how? > S3 was invented in 2006. Because looking back at that, it feels odd that it's only 13 years ago, and how much the industry has changed in that time. Back then S3 was this weird thing that Amazon came out with. A file hosting service that didn't let you do anything except store or fetch files. Sure, it's low cost... but I can't process them without downloading them again and paying for the data access (twice!). Why the hell would I want that? SmugMug's use case was the first I saw that actually made sense. Back then, if you weren't able to afford buying a server and putting it in a colo facility, you'd go rent a server on a monthly/yearly basis from the likes of ThePlanet, and host those files yourself on your server. If you needed redundancy, you'd have to figure out syncing between the servers yourself. Now? Spin up an AWS instance or trigger a function, serve a link to the file in S3 or via a cloudfront distribution. Even if you need to process the data before serving it - stream it straight out of S3, through your application and to the user.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  Stackexchange is probably one of the only companies that's doing hardware efficiently. https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar... Everyone else is more than happy to give more money to cloud hosting companies.
  - kick 7y ago
    Somewhere on codinghorror.com, Jeff Atwood has a really good post on this.
    - vladd 7y ago
      Are you talking about "The Cloud is Just Someone Else's Computer"? If so, it's available at https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-else...
  - mey 7y ago
    Backblaze is doing storage cheaper with their own gear.
  - basch 7y ago
    Dropbox, ServiceNow? ServiceNow goes so far as to give customers non-shared bare metal.
- fragsworth 7y ago
  You're forgetting that engineers are expensive, and dedicated servers means spending more engineering time on things. Almost everyone considers hosting their own hardware, and it turns out that for most companies it's just not economical. I really doubt they switched to AWS because it's "cool". Also, isn't CDN bandwidth and data transfer going to be the lion's share of their costs? That's not a problem you can just throw dedicated servers at.
  - kick 7y ago
    I'm not forgetting that at all: I don't see how a dedicated server takes any more time than AWS. AWS adds extra things you have to do and manage. Also, data transfer and bandwidth is far cheaper with dedicated and colos than AWS.
    - anyfoo 7y ago
      Physical space, building and upgrading the servers, monitoring and replacing components of the servers and their vast storage arrays when they are broken, upgrading the hardware, making sure all the software is up to date with latest security patches, reaching either end of life of their version and having to perform major upgrades with potential compatibility problems, cable management, all this at remote locations... Vs. managing an Amazon account from a desk, any desk really, you don’t see the appeal?
      - latch 7y ago
        Imagine you're looking for a new place to live. You go to a realtor and he starts showing you McMansions and telling you how great they are. You say: "But those are really expensive, require a ton of maintenance, and hard to sell later on" Your agent looks at you and says: "Yes but do you really went to find land, get the permits, get it developed, deal with all those contractors and deal with the inevitable problems of a new constructions? A McMansion is obviously better." The agent has apparently never heard of apartments, condos, semi-detached and so on (yet somehow holds a very strong opinion). This is a problem; you find a new agent.
      - 7y ago
- haecceity 7y ago
  What makes Flickr more suited for dedicated hosting rather than awe?
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    Money?
  - y4mi 7y ago
    Bandwidth is expensive on aws. Image and video hosting is usually significantly cheaper on bare metal where you just get unmetered bandwidth from housing providers
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      You don't know what bulk discounts large customers negotiate. High egress prices are a way to get a few extra bucks off small-potato hypermilers
      - y4mi 7y ago
        You're right, I don't know their discounts. It's still more expensive unless they get paid for using the bandwidth though
cyberjunkie 7y ago
I have so many mixed feelings about this. I've always been a big Flickr fan. I absolutely loved the Explore section. It had a set of really nice photos that I would spend every evening after working, browsing, sipping on a cup of tea and listening to music. I find some fun groups, some people who click some great photos on some really impressive gear which I don't own, but I would love to. The quality of Explore dropped drastically, sometimes showing up weird, creepy things, or something just random photos. It didn’t seem curated at all. Fast-forward to recent times, I've seen Flickr bought and sold, schemes changed and more. There have been times of instability on the site, the Yahoo! login has been a pain. Performance has been erratic as a whole. At a time where Instagram, Google Photos (and other cunning) services are the only healthy (in terms of users), ‘social’ photo hosting services, Flickr to my naive mind stands out so I don't want to see it go away. I started paying for a Flickr Pro to support it, even backed up my entire photo base to it. Now, I’m not sure if I need find alternatives I feel the e-mail sounds more personal, than the usual two-faced PR spiel we see from larger corporations. It's nice that Smugmug appears to have good intentions, but it hasn't treated Flickr too well either. Logins have been broken in the recent past, there have been several outages, terrible migration attempts that almost speak of incompetence. Of late, it says I can't login using Firefox. Once logged in (after setting a different User Agent), it works perfectly fine. So I really don't know what to feel.
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  Fuck em. Both Yahoo! and SmugMug have beaten the dead horse that is Flickr more than enough. I've moved on (and self-host these days) and I'm not looking back even if there were some inkling that Flickr was better at image hosting than I am. For me, Flickr became less and less usable with every UI update. Back when Sonic was charging beaucoup bucks for 3Mbit DSL in San Francisco this was a big usability problem. The social stuff was neglected (SNR on the groups became abysmal). For a while I had a "pro" account. At some point they marked my account adult only with no explanation so I made another (free accout) and moved on. Then Yahoo! migrated everyone to Yahoo! logins and my Flickr accounts kind of operated in some odd grey area and I just use Flickr for free photo storage. And then came SmugMug. My last public Flickr post was a screenshot of what SmugMug did to the Flickr mobile app — they'd just pushed some notification about the SmugMug buyout and all of the "excitement" clobbered the navigation links[1]. I tried in vain to migrate my Flickr account. The mobile app worked but wouldn't let me reset my password. The desktop site would send reset messages to my email address, but the auth infra thought I shouldn't be allowed to reset my password from that email address. Obviously the SmugMug guy who was posting on HN never got back to me. Neither dud Flickr/SmugMug support. So I went back to self-hosting. And it worked. I didn't even have to beg support for access to anything. And now SmugMug wants more money? Sorry guys, you've had many chances. 1: https://live.staticflickr.com/979/41376824904_bba1b08851_o.png https://live.staticflickr.com/979/41376824904_bba1b08851_o.p...
bepvte 7y ago
https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Flickr https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Flickr
nstart 7y ago
What I don't understand here is why SmugMug bought Flickr in the first place. Smugmug is such a great example of how to build a profitable photo storing/sharing-ish business, that to buy a service that is bleeding money without a path to break even seems like such an odd choice.
- xeromal 7y ago
  If you take their message at face value, they bought flickr just because they thought they should save it. If you can't believe that, feel free to come up with any conspiracy you want.
  - xwowsersx 7y ago
    I'm not sure what this adds. "They thought they should have it"? That just begs the question...
    - anyfoo 7y ago
      Save it, not have it.
      - xwowsersx 7y ago
        OMG my bad. Thanks hahah
        Hnrobert42 7y ago
        It’s so nice to see internet discussions resolved amicably. ️
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
olliej 7y ago
How much of the running costs of Flickr are from hosting the free portion? How much does the paid portion cost? Mostly I’m wondering, is there any value to having the free portion anymore?
- lathiat 7y ago
  In most cases it's a valuable gateway to getting new users They already removed all but 1000 photos from free accounts, which given they're now paying AWS per byte for storage makes sense I guess.
  - olliej 7y ago
    It’s more what is the functional cost of acquisition, and is it less than the per user revenue of the paid acccounts?
sdan 7y ago
Where are former customer going? Where are people looking to host photos going nowadays? Just want to survey HN. Personally, although I am relatively hardcore on privacy, I go with Google Photos on an anonymous account (I know that since it's Google, nothing is truly anonymous, but from the steps I've taken hopefully it's a bit more sanitized) because their AI can filter and organize my photos is ways that I simply don't have the time to do.
- mceachen 7y ago
  I got sick of site after site closing down along with my albums, or, worse, using my metadata to feed the panopticon, so I quit my job to build an alternative. It's early days still, but ML auto tagging is on the horizon. Runs on desktops, servers, and within docker. Details in my profile.
  - xwowsersx 7y ago
    This looks promising, thanks for sharing. Enjoyed reading about how you use metadata to tag everything and make it easy to find related photos.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Join up with this person https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21842347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21842347 We don't need more half-attempts.
    - mceachen 7y ago
      Thanks for your suggestion. PhotoStructure already has the best metadata inference and asset de-duplicating system that I'm aware of. It scales to millions of asset files, works cross-platform, handles JPG, RAW, and transcodes videos to web-browsable formats automatically. I haven't used an open-source project yet that didn't fall over after the first several thousand imports, and none de-dupe (not just the same SHA, mind you, but the semantically equivalent image, based on both metadata and rotation-invariant image content). They also tend to be abandoned when the original author moves on due personal reasons, toxic comments, or the "v2 rewrite" effort collapses under it's own weight.
Nrbelex 7y ago
Only four months ago, the same CEO said here at HN: >I hope you'll stick it out with us, because we're nearly done migrating one of the largest web services on the planet, which means we get to focus on building again instead of just copying. The future is bright. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649186 I've been a Flickr user for 13 years, and I can't say I'm surprised it's back in a precarious state. The sense that it could close up or drastically change (for the worse) has always been one of its defining characteristics. This is only the most recent in a string of disappointments following commitments to reinvigoration by successive owners. I remember telling Marissa Mayer, in person, thanks for investing in Flickr under Yahoo when they invited users to their relaunch [https://www.flickr.com/photos/nrbelex/8766466511/in/album-72157633572443128/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/nrbelex/8766466511/in/album-72...]. Almost immediately Yahoo lost interest. They made some minor UI changes, but the service as a whole languished. They probably came to the same conclusion: there's virtually no realistic path to profitability. At this point, Flickr is simply too lumbering to become a competitor to Instagram. That's probably for the best. If they'd tried to make Flickr an Instagram clone, they'd probably have lost what few remaining dedicated users exist. The platform emphasizes the photos, and the community, or at least parts of it if you know where to look, really is focused on high quality images. It's a particular bummer because Flickr is one of those services that's supposed to prove that a service can be primarily subscription-supported rather than ad supported if the product is good enough. If Flickr can't pull it off, even with a seemingly the best possible owner, what hope do other online services have? Flickr can and has jacked up pro prices--which is fine, frankly--but as this email makes clear, it probably won't be enough.
aaronbrethorst 7y ago
I renewed my Flickr Pro subscription for the first time in a few years after SmugMug's acquisition, but I barely ended up using the site, and let it lapse a month or so ago. It bums me out to say it, but I think photography might have moved on from Flickr. I know mine has, at least.
- rpastuszak 7y ago
  But, where? I’m genuinely curious about alternatives. Insta is a like driven mess, with almost no possibility for constructive feedback, thoughtful discussions about photography, critique. 500px had a decent UX, incl. galleries, comments, but quickly became a formula-driven, Instagram-like monster. Reddit... has decent communities, but it’s features are limited, the right UX just isn’t there. Is this a niche that can be filled easily (community vs. black magic/algo-driven discovery, archiving and photo critique)? Or, is this just a really hard problem to solve in a sustainable (financially) way?
  - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
    None of the above. I found a local darkroom and a group of likeminded photographers with whom I have regular critique sessions. I don’t find online critique to be useful for the directions in which I’ve been taking my work over the past couple years. More casual stuff gets posted on IG.
    - rpastuszak 7y ago
      Thanks, I'm wondering if online critique is just hard in general or if the issue stems mostly from poor UX and/or algo driven discovery promoting content that appeals to the majority whilst sacrificing more risky, unusual work. Also, care to share a portfolio/IG?
      - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
        My portfolio, sadly out of date, is here: http://www.aaronbrethorstphotography.com http://www.aaronbrethorstphotography.com My Flickr page is here: https://flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst https://flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aaronbrethorst/ https://www.instagram.com/aaronbrethorst/
chewz 7y ago
Personal Photo Management powered by Go and Google TensorFlow - https://demo.photoprism.org/ https://demo.photoprism.org/ [] https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism
- pritambarhate 7y ago
  That demo works quite fast. Can you please let us know what kind of hardware are you using to deploy this? Any secret sauce to make it load fast?
Oras 7y ago
I have received the email yesterday, been a Flickr user for 10 years. I had mixed feelings as I really like Flickr but at the same time how would the subscription save the company? The email didn't mention numbers of pro accounts required to break even or reduce the loss. At the same time, I thought we they didn't put some adverts for non-Pro memebers to test if this would help to provide a new income stream which might worth more than a Pro subscription.
outime 7y ago
It’d be very sad to see Flickr die. I started amateur photography many years ago and immediately signed up and even paid pro account for years. After I got busy with other stuff I stopped paying it, but still is my main place for photos and even sold a few just because of the exposure. I guess it’s getting a bit desperate if they have to ask for subscriptions via email. Also the fact that they moved to AWS for a service that depends so much on data transfer makes me think it’ll get even tougher to survive. I hope I’m wrong.

66 points by hellisothers 7y ago

kick 7y ago

Why AWS? It'd doubtlessly be cheaper to throw Flickr onto dedicated servers (by a ton). It would also probably help if they freed the source code of Flickr, so others could contribute and make it lighter to run. A site like Flickr is exactly what you want to keep as far away from AWS as possible.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
I agreed. You dont even need crazy SSDs for all the data. You can have spin disks which have gotten cheaper for TB of data for the older images and SSDs for the cached ones (most recently accessed) and voila.
- basch 7y ago
  For write once archiving, bluray is an option too. Although who knows how long the discs last.
kibibyte 7y ago
SmugMug seems to be hosted on AWS (based on doing a DNS lookup and seeing who owns that IP). I wouldn't be surprised if moving it all to AWS was the path of least resistance to an engineering team that understands AWS more than managing a dedicated hardware fleet.
- paranoidrobot 7y ago
  The SmugMug team were the first people I remember seeing use S3 for more than a 'hello world' project. This blog entry from 2006[1] is only 13 years old, but feels like it should be older. Back then, putting that much data for a publicly accessible site was considered pretty insane. [1] https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-grail/ https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-...
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Older how? S3 was invented in 2006. What was S3 used for if not for hosting website data?
    - sct202 7y ago
      At the place I work we transfer files with one of our vendors via s3.
    - paranoidrobot 7y ago
      > Older how? > S3 was invented in 2006. Because looking back at that, it feels odd that it's only 13 years ago, and how much the industry has changed in that time. Back then S3 was this weird thing that Amazon came out with. A file hosting service that didn't let you do anything except store or fetch files. Sure, it's low cost... but I can't process them without downloading them again and paying for the data access (twice!). Why the hell would I want that? SmugMug's use case was the first I saw that actually made sense. Back then, if you weren't able to afford buying a server and putting it in a colo facility, you'd go rent a server on a monthly/yearly basis from the likes of ThePlanet, and host those files yourself on your server. If you needed redundancy, you'd have to figure out syncing between the servers yourself. Now? Spin up an AWS instance or trigger a function, serve a link to the file in S3 or via a cloudfront distribution. Even if you need to process the data before serving it - stream it straight out of S3, through your application and to the user.
sansnomme 7y ago
Stackexchange is probably one of the only companies that's doing hardware efficiently. https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar... Everyone else is more than happy to give more money to cloud hosting companies.
- kick 7y ago
  Somewhere on codinghorror.com, Jeff Atwood has a really good post on this.
  - vladd 7y ago
    Are you talking about "The Cloud is Just Someone Else's Computer"? If so, it's available at https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-else...
- mey 7y ago
  Backblaze is doing storage cheaper with their own gear.
- basch 7y ago
  Dropbox, ServiceNow? ServiceNow goes so far as to give customers non-shared bare metal.
fragsworth 7y ago
You're forgetting that engineers are expensive, and dedicated servers means spending more engineering time on things. Almost everyone considers hosting their own hardware, and it turns out that for most companies it's just not economical. I really doubt they switched to AWS because it's "cool". Also, isn't CDN bandwidth and data transfer going to be the lion's share of their costs? That's not a problem you can just throw dedicated servers at.
- kick 7y ago
  I'm not forgetting that at all: I don't see how a dedicated server takes any more time than AWS. AWS adds extra things you have to do and manage. Also, data transfer and bandwidth is far cheaper with dedicated and colos than AWS.
  - anyfoo 7y ago
    Physical space, building and upgrading the servers, monitoring and replacing components of the servers and their vast storage arrays when they are broken, upgrading the hardware, making sure all the software is up to date with latest security patches, reaching either end of life of their version and having to perform major upgrades with potential compatibility problems, cable management, all this at remote locations... Vs. managing an Amazon account from a desk, any desk really, you don’t see the appeal?
    - latch 7y ago
      Imagine you're looking for a new place to live. You go to a realtor and he starts showing you McMansions and telling you how great they are. You say: "But those are really expensive, require a ton of maintenance, and hard to sell later on" Your agent looks at you and says: "Yes but do you really went to find land, get the permits, get it developed, deal with all those contractors and deal with the inevitable problems of a new constructions? A McMansion is obviously better." The agent has apparently never heard of apartments, condos, semi-detached and so on (yet somehow holds a very strong opinion). This is a problem; you find a new agent.
    - 7y ago
haecceity 7y ago
What makes Flickr more suited for dedicated hosting rather than awe?
- ryanlol 7y ago
  Money?
- y4mi 7y ago
  Bandwidth is expensive on aws. Image and video hosting is usually significantly cheaper on bare metal where you just get unmetered bandwidth from housing providers
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    You don't know what bulk discounts large customers negotiate. High egress prices are a way to get a few extra bucks off small-potato hypermilers
    - y4mi 7y ago
      You're right, I don't know their discounts. It's still more expensive unless they get paid for using the bandwidth though

cyberjunkie 7y ago

I have so many mixed feelings about this. I've always been a big Flickr fan. I absolutely loved the Explore section. It had a set of really nice photos that I would spend every evening after working, browsing, sipping on a cup of tea and listening to music. I find some fun groups, some people who click some great photos on some really impressive gear which I don't own, but I would love to. The quality of Explore dropped drastically, sometimes showing up weird, creepy things, or something just random photos. It didn’t seem curated at all. Fast-forward to recent times, I've seen Flickr bought and sold, schemes changed and more. There have been times of instability on the site, the Yahoo! login has been a pain. Performance has been erratic as a whole. At a time where Instagram, Google Photos (and other cunning) services are the only healthy (in terms of users), ‘social’ photo hosting services, Flickr to my naive mind stands out so I don't want to see it go away. I started paying for a Flickr Pro to support it, even backed up my entire photo base to it. Now, I’m not sure if I need find alternatives I feel the e-mail sounds more personal, than the usual two-faced PR spiel we see from larger corporations. It's nice that Smugmug appears to have good intentions, but it hasn't treated Flickr too well either. Logins have been broken in the recent past, there have been several outages, terrible migration attempts that almost speak of incompetence. Of late, it says I can't login using Firefox. Once logged in (after setting a different User Agent), it works perfectly fine. So I really don't know what to feel.

inferiorhuman 7y ago
Fuck em. Both Yahoo! and SmugMug have beaten the dead horse that is Flickr more than enough. I've moved on (and self-host these days) and I'm not looking back even if there were some inkling that Flickr was better at image hosting than I am. For me, Flickr became less and less usable with every UI update. Back when Sonic was charging beaucoup bucks for 3Mbit DSL in San Francisco this was a big usability problem. The social stuff was neglected (SNR on the groups became abysmal). For a while I had a "pro" account. At some point they marked my account adult only with no explanation so I made another (free accout) and moved on. Then Yahoo! migrated everyone to Yahoo! logins and my Flickr accounts kind of operated in some odd grey area and I just use Flickr for free photo storage. And then came SmugMug. My last public Flickr post was a screenshot of what SmugMug did to the Flickr mobile app — they'd just pushed some notification about the SmugMug buyout and all of the "excitement" clobbered the navigation links[1]. I tried in vain to migrate my Flickr account. The mobile app worked but wouldn't let me reset my password. The desktop site would send reset messages to my email address, but the auth infra thought I shouldn't be allowed to reset my password from that email address. Obviously the SmugMug guy who was posting on HN never got back to me. Neither dud Flickr/SmugMug support. So I went back to self-hosting. And it worked. I didn't even have to beg support for access to anything. And now SmugMug wants more money? Sorry guys, you've had many chances. 1: https://live.staticflickr.com/979/41376824904_bba1b08851_o.png https://live.staticflickr.com/979/41376824904_bba1b08851_o.p...

bepvte 7y ago

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Flickr https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Flickr

nstart 7y ago

What I don't understand here is why SmugMug bought Flickr in the first place. Smugmug is such a great example of how to build a profitable photo storing/sharing-ish business, that to buy a service that is bleeding money without a path to break even seems like such an odd choice.

xeromal 7y ago
If you take their message at face value, they bought flickr just because they thought they should save it. If you can't believe that, feel free to come up with any conspiracy you want.
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  I'm not sure what this adds. "They thought they should have it"? That just begs the question...
  - anyfoo 7y ago
    Save it, not have it.
    - xwowsersx 7y ago
      OMG my bad. Thanks hahah
      - Hnrobert42 7y ago
        It’s so nice to see internet discussions resolved amicably. ️

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

olliej 7y ago

How much of the running costs of Flickr are from hosting the free portion? How much does the paid portion cost? Mostly I’m wondering, is there any value to having the free portion anymore?

lathiat 7y ago
In most cases it's a valuable gateway to getting new users They already removed all but 1000 photos from free accounts, which given they're now paying AWS per byte for storage makes sense I guess.
- olliej 7y ago
  It’s more what is the functional cost of acquisition, and is it less than the per user revenue of the paid acccounts?

sdan 7y ago

Where are former customer going? Where are people looking to host photos going nowadays? Just want to survey HN. Personally, although I am relatively hardcore on privacy, I go with Google Photos on an anonymous account (I know that since it's Google, nothing is truly anonymous, but from the steps I've taken hopefully it's a bit more sanitized) because their AI can filter and organize my photos is ways that I simply don't have the time to do.

mceachen 7y ago
I got sick of site after site closing down along with my albums, or, worse, using my metadata to feed the panopticon, so I quit my job to build an alternative. It's early days still, but ML auto tagging is on the horizon. Runs on desktops, servers, and within docker. Details in my profile.
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  This looks promising, thanks for sharing. Enjoyed reading about how you use metadata to tag everything and make it easy to find related photos.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Join up with this person https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21842347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21842347 We don't need more half-attempts.
  - mceachen 7y ago
    Thanks for your suggestion. PhotoStructure already has the best metadata inference and asset de-duplicating system that I'm aware of. It scales to millions of asset files, works cross-platform, handles JPG, RAW, and transcodes videos to web-browsable formats automatically. I haven't used an open-source project yet that didn't fall over after the first several thousand imports, and none de-dupe (not just the same SHA, mind you, but the semantically equivalent image, based on both metadata and rotation-invariant image content). They also tend to be abandoned when the original author moves on due personal reasons, toxic comments, or the "v2 rewrite" effort collapses under it's own weight.

Nrbelex 7y ago

Only four months ago, the same CEO said here at HN: >I hope you'll stick it out with us, because we're nearly done migrating one of the largest web services on the planet, which means we get to focus on building again instead of just copying. The future is bright. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649186 I've been a Flickr user for 13 years, and I can't say I'm surprised it's back in a precarious state. The sense that it could close up or drastically change (for the worse) has always been one of its defining characteristics. This is only the most recent in a string of disappointments following commitments to reinvigoration by successive owners. I remember telling Marissa Mayer, in person, thanks for investing in Flickr under Yahoo when they invited users to their relaunch [https://www.flickr.com/photos/nrbelex/8766466511/in/album-72157633572443128/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/nrbelex/8766466511/in/album-72...]. Almost immediately Yahoo lost interest. They made some minor UI changes, but the service as a whole languished. They probably came to the same conclusion: there's virtually no realistic path to profitability. At this point, Flickr is simply too lumbering to become a competitor to Instagram. That's probably for the best. If they'd tried to make Flickr an Instagram clone, they'd probably have lost what few remaining dedicated users exist. The platform emphasizes the photos, and the community, or at least parts of it if you know where to look, really is focused on high quality images. It's a particular bummer because Flickr is one of those services that's supposed to prove that a service can be primarily subscription-supported rather than ad supported if the product is good enough. If Flickr can't pull it off, even with a seemingly the best possible owner, what hope do other online services have? Flickr can and has jacked up pro prices--which is fine, frankly--but as this email makes clear, it probably won't be enough.

aaronbrethorst 7y ago

I renewed my Flickr Pro subscription for the first time in a few years after SmugMug's acquisition, but I barely ended up using the site, and let it lapse a month or so ago. It bums me out to say it, but I think photography might have moved on from Flickr. I know mine has, at least.

rpastuszak 7y ago
But, where? I’m genuinely curious about alternatives. Insta is a like driven mess, with almost no possibility for constructive feedback, thoughtful discussions about photography, critique. 500px had a decent UX, incl. galleries, comments, but quickly became a formula-driven, Instagram-like monster. Reddit... has decent communities, but it’s features are limited, the right UX just isn’t there. Is this a niche that can be filled easily (community vs. black magic/algo-driven discovery, archiving and photo critique)? Or, is this just a really hard problem to solve in a sustainable (financially) way?
- aaronbrethorst 7y ago
  None of the above. I found a local darkroom and a group of likeminded photographers with whom I have regular critique sessions. I don’t find online critique to be useful for the directions in which I’ve been taking my work over the past couple years. More casual stuff gets posted on IG.
  - rpastuszak 7y ago
    Thanks, I'm wondering if online critique is just hard in general or if the issue stems mostly from poor UX and/or algo driven discovery promoting content that appeals to the majority whilst sacrificing more risky, unusual work. Also, care to share a portfolio/IG?
    - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
      My portfolio, sadly out of date, is here: http://www.aaronbrethorstphotography.com http://www.aaronbrethorstphotography.com My Flickr page is here: https://flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst https://flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aaronbrethorst/ https://www.instagram.com/aaronbrethorst/

chewz 7y ago

Personal Photo Management powered by Go and Google TensorFlow - https://demo.photoprism.org/ https://demo.photoprism.org/ [] https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

pritambarhate 7y ago
That demo works quite fast. Can you please let us know what kind of hardware are you using to deploy this? Any secret sauce to make it load fast?

Oras 7y ago

I have received the email yesterday, been a Flickr user for 10 years. I had mixed feelings as I really like Flickr but at the same time how would the subscription save the company? The email didn't mention numbers of pro accounts required to break even or reduce the loss. At the same time, I thought we they didn't put some adverts for non-Pro memebers to test if this would help to provide a new income stream which might worth more than a Pro subscription.

outime 7y ago

It’d be very sad to see Flickr die. I started amateur photography many years ago and immediately signed up and even paid pro account for years. After I got busy with other stuff I stopped paying it, but still is my main place for photos and even sold a few just because of the exposure. I guess it’s getting a bit desperate if they have to ask for subscriptions via email. Also the fact that they moved to AWS for a service that depends so much on data transfer makes me think it’ll get even tougher to survive. I hope I’m wrong.