18 ms·

Whatever happened to Flickr?

241 points by alok-g 5y ago

ssss11 5y ago
Yahoo
- dylan604 5y ago
  Has there ever been a postive result for the site being purchased be megaCorp? Sure, the founders make out like bandits, but has it ever been a net positive for the site itself?
  - perryizgr8 5y ago
    Instagram seems to be doing quite well.
    - zimpenfish 5y ago
      I dunno - my experience using Instagram is that it is radically worse these days. The mobile app doesn't show a chronological feed, doesn't even show me everyone I follow, every 7-8th image is a sponsored ad, they relentlessly push reels which I have no interest in watching into my feed, etc. Even the upload process - which was their huge selling point originally - is slowly becoming more frictional.
  - ianhawes 5y ago
    Github
    - mikro2nd 5y ago
      Time will tell.
    - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
      What's the positive result here?
      - acdha 5y ago
        They’ve expanded a lot of services like CI, remote workspaces, etc. which appear to be Azure-adjacent and VSCode beats the pants off of Atom.
pythonic_hell 5y ago
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.
- ianlevesque 5y ago
  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...
  - julius_deane 5y ago
    - reduce freeloading - increase price for paid accounts - focus on serving paid customers > un-sustainable — the orange website
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - muststopmyths 5y ago
    So, I was really pissed off when they said they'd start deleting pictures instead of hiding them like the old Flickr. I was never going to re-upload all my pictures if I decided to go Pro again in the future. So I thought Flickr was effectively dead to me. However, in the 2 years since they announced that, all my 6000+ photos were still there. I never checked to see how many were still publicly visible, though. I wonder if they exposed only the newest 1000 public photos. That might account for the "63% of images lost" stat above. Finally, this fall I needed a photo-sharing site again and decided I still like Flickr with its shitty "new" UI better than most other sites. I particularly like collections of albums and the maps of photos. Plus, the overall UI for browsing an album is simple. No annoying sales-catalog style layouts. I have OneDrive for my camera uploads (habit carried over from Windows Phone) and other private uploads, but anything I want to share publicly will go on Flickr. They had a pretty good sale on Black Friday, so I ended up signing up for a year. Still keep backups of my photos locally of course and I am ready to bail if they change it to look like Smugmug :-)
karmakaze 5y ago
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).
- runjake 5y ago
  I believe Flickr started off with a white background. I also remember Flickr being an extremely popular site. Then, Yahoo acquired it. Then they started censoring it. Then they neglected it. Then Flickr became effectively a ghost town. Since then, apparently SmugMug has acquired it.
Jabed30 5y ago
[dead]
Jenk 5y ago
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.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  They're no longer owned by Yahoo/Oath and are now part of SmugMug.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
- rcpt 5y ago
  The Yahoo login thing killed me. But I did like the idea of "flickr: photo sharing for people who have Yahoo.com email addresses"
  - petre 5y ago
    Death through association.
- dpark 5y ago
  > transferring ownership of the photos to Flickr, not even attributing the photographers I would love to know what you’re talking about here.
neom 5y ago
"In 2007, Flickr was the most popular dedicated photo-sharing site on the web, and growing exponentially in terms of new images uploaded." Uhm, as far as I remember it, Flickr never surpassed daily actives or daily uploads over DeviantART, not by a long shot. I'm quite sure the photo gallery did considerably more volume than Flickr. Edit- shouldn't have used never: but in 2007 I don't believe that to be true.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  I find that hard to believe.
- acdha 5y ago
  I'd be quite surprised if that was true for the timeframe in question: the total number of images for 2015 were roughly the same as Flickr users had uploaded in a single year 8 years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeviantArt#cite_ref-34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeviantArt#cite_ref-34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr#/media/File:How_many_public_photos_are_uploaded_to_Flickr_every_day,_month,_year?_(6855169886).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr#/media/File:How_many_pu... One big confound arrived when Flickr started having automatic uploaders which meant that a lot of accounts had every photo someone took on their phone even if most of them never saw much activity. DeviantArt had deliberation in the upload path so I'd expect lower numbers but higher average quality.
  - neom 5y ago
    I have no way of knowing for sure, but I was keeping a close eye on how we did in terms of web traffic at the time, especially when Flickr showed up on the scene, deviantART was in it's peak in 2005, we'd just released dAmn and started putting ajax on the website in a serious way, and release prints in 2006, I can't believe in 2007 Flickr was doing more volume than DeviantART, but it could be true, and I don't really have a way to know for sure, so for sure an anecdote. I know Chris the CTO at the time kicks around HN, maybe he'll chime in. I shouldn't have used never, I don't really know what happened after 2011+, but at least I'd be willing to challenge 2007, but only based on my memory. Edit: Probably another strike against my claim is they said dedicated photo share sites, and dA was an art community, I still suspect the photo gallery at the time was doing more than flickr combined, also, Flickr had it's fair share of Yiffy and Furries during that period.
sircastor 5y ago
I remember Flickr was tremendously popular. It has everything going for it. Anecdotally, one year my wife asked for a paid membership - that indicated to me that they were doing something right as my wife was pretty hesitant to spend money on a service like that. I recall they sort of stopped developing and enhancing it. It died on the vine from neglect. I do recall when Yahoo bought it there was some talk of “fixing Flickr” but I don’t think it ever happened.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
mikotodomo 5y ago
My parents used flickr. I never found out what it does.
mam4 5y ago
Well basically if you are going to make people pay for a photo storage website with a good visualization but somewhat shitty upload system they are just going to flee to a "general file storage" cloud for the same price with a 'slightly shittier' way of viewing them, such as drive or onedrive. (Especially if you threaten to delete already existing photos) Source: i moved to onerive in 2019
- leephillips 5y ago
  I just took a look at Onedrive. 1TB for $60/year. Flickr is unlimited for $72/yr, and has an API and other conveniences specialized to images. > onedrive
  - mam4 5y ago
    6T for 99 dollars with family pack. More than necessary And its not only images. Images are 20% of my cloud only
    - leephillips 5y ago
      So you agree that “same price” is incorrect. But, true of course, Flickr is just for photographs.
      - mam4 5y ago
        Yeah. How many of us did not care for mucv than free storage ? Probably the 50% mentionned ib the article
epa 5y ago
Marissa Mayer, thats what. [1] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17264274/flickr-smugmug-yahoo-oath-verizon-deal-photo-sharing-service-mobile-instagram https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17264274/flickr-smugmug-yahoo-...
- bborud 5y ago
  You can blame Marissa Mayer for a lot of things. But Flickr was doomed the second they were acquired by Yahoo!.
  - dpark 5y ago
    Mayer can’t be blamed for much at yahoo. She was brought in to save a sinking ship and it turned out to be unsalvageable. Steve Jobs couldn’t have turned that one around.
    - bsder 5y ago
      > Mayer can’t be blamed for much at yahoo. She was brought in to save a sinking ship and it turned out to be unsalvageable. Erm, why not? She got paid a ton and failed. She should be blamed. Yahoo absolutely could have been turned around. Yahoo Japan shows that. The problem, like so many CEOs, was lack of clear vision. When you are failing, you have to place the bet and drive it through. Sure, the probability is that you will lose but if you don't then losing becomes a certainty. The problem is that this is anathema to anybody who who was good at the middle management game. You get ahead as a middle manager not by placing big bets but by mostly avoiding failure.
      - dpark 5y ago
        > Erm, why not? She got paid a ton and failed. She should be blamed. Because it’s absurd to only blame the last person in a line of ceos who presided over more than a decade of decline. > Yahoo absolutely could have been turned around. Yahoo Japan shows that. Yahoo Japan was always special. It was not a wholly owned subsidiary and also did not experience the same decline. It wasn’t turned around. It didn’t need a turnaround.
petilon 5y ago
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".
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  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.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    JC Penney was on its way out, or at least in terminal decline. It did not matter who took the helm, the change to online shopping meant there was going to be consolidation as demand for in person shopping went down. Even Macys is struggling, and now they have a part of the store that sells basically non returnable junk, like a dollar store. There is typically only room for 1 or 2 retail businesses now per market segment (how much customers are willing/able to spend).
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - hakfoo 5y ago
      Macy's seemed to slide significantly downmarket over the last few decades. I feel like, growing up in the 80s and 90s, in a place where they weren't, it was seen as an upper-tier product, a notch below Neiman-Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue, but decidedly fancier than Penney's or Sears. Then they either went acquisition-mad, or started rebranding other stores they owned (not sure which) because a local chain became Macy's, and it never lived up to that hype. Now they're doing their own take on Kohl's Kash, which just screams "premium retail experience."
simonw 5y ago
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. Then Instagram happened.
- kaichanvong 5y ago
  good point! Instagram happened!
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    While Instagram and Flickr (at least in theory) serve a different audience. Flickr is for the professional or aspiring amateur photographer, to manage their photos and build show cases. Maybe even selling their photos online. Instagram is a mass market social network
    - simonw 5y ago
      Flickr was a mass market social network back in ~2007 if you squint at it in the right way.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        You'd have to squint very very hard. Certainly lots of people who used Flickr for free online photo storage are on Instagram today. But the social network aspect of Flickr was always pretty focused on the prosumer and, perhaps to a lesser degree, pro base who were willing to pay an annual fee. It's not clear to me that Flickr (and now Flickr/Smugmug) could have co-existed on the same service as Instagram. So the Flickr could have been Instagram narrative, which if true would have been great for the founders, would also have been awful for the most serious users of the Flickr service.
dawolf- 5y ago
flickr has a great API. I am using the flickr API to manage my photography portfolio website. I can organize everything (uploading, naming, ordering, etc.) using the flickr album tools and then just pull it into my site.
Brajeshwar 5y ago
I can't login to Flickr anymore. I tried my Yahoo account (just used for Flickr) but I'm I a loop. Flickr was, perhaps, where it all started with "social photo sharing" and I liked it. Last time I remember, my photos had over 10Million views. I did do a Takeout but I like to still own my account there. I used to give out a lot of Pro memberships to people, mostly students and early aspiring photographers, during the early days.
tomcooks 5y ago
Yahoo, that's what happened. Yahoo and their stupid Yahoo login.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  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). The real damage came later.
  - antifa 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean, I've lost my yahoo account permanently due to inactivity.
  - acdha 5y ago
    > 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 > The real damage came later. That was the real damage: once Yahoo! bought them, things stagnated except for when they made it worse. The rest of the market didn't stand still while they were by all accounts fighting internal political battles.
severak_cz 5y ago
This is the same problem as with Imgur and it's various clones - https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-online-services.html https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...
- dehrmann 5y ago
  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.
deanc 5y ago
I've seen a few new photo hosting applications creep up now and then in recent HN threads like this, but none have really hit the spot for me. I take photos as a hobby, nothing too serious, mainly if the weather is nice or we're on vacation. I have a Fujifilm X100F and an old Canon DSLR. I rarely use my Canon. Fuji strikes a perfect balance between on-camera processing (film simulations), quality and mainly size - that it's become my primary driver. There is a subreddit with a plethora of monotonous, uninteresting images with white boards on reddit at /r/fujix. I miss the diversity and creativity of early flickr. Google Photos is my go-to nowadays for hosting photos, and sharing with the family. Everyone I know has a google account, and sharing is super easy. Their UI is the best I have ever used - so quick and snappy and probably the most implementation of infinite scroll I've seen. But it's just that - nothing more. What I really want is something that allows me to do everything. I want to be able to upload my RAW photos and not have to think about it in terms of space or cost (at least not at the current prices). I want to be able to edit them using powerful tools (as in Lightroom or Darktable [my current choice as i refuse to pay for lightroom]) in the same tool I use to upload and manage them. I want to be able to be part of a community of photographers and sharing my photos within that community or namespace/tag should be seamless and I should not have to think too much about the divide between my personal life and my online life. I should be able to really quickly take a family photo album and safely indicate that this is for public consideration outside of that album. I should be able to use machine learning to intelligently and automatically apply a vasty array of tags to my images, only using a cursory glance to validate them. I want it to intelligently classify locations, so if I'm travelling around Austria - I could just say show me photos from west tyrol without needing to enter the exact city or look at some poorly rendered and slow map. The problem with the current solutions, are the division of tools, the division of disciplines, the cost of storage, the shitty UIs, and the difficulty in creating communities around interests, cameras and/or styles.
- Terretta 5y ago
  > What I really want is something that allows me to do everything. > I refuse to pay…
  - deanc 5y ago
leephillips 5y ago
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.
- tjr225 5y ago
  I used to use Flickr, but iCloud storage is cheaper and more convenient.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    Do you need to be an Apple citizen?
    - colecut 5y ago
      Google photos is also pretty cheap and convenient.
      - leephillips 5y ago
        Google storage is 2 TB for $100/yr. Flickr is unlimited for $72/yr.
        hiptobecubic 5y ago
        IMO they serve very different purposes. Google Photos has very good search and collaborative album building. The result is that you can take random photos of your life and still get value out of it later. It's not archival quality, but it's extremely accessible, which makes up for it, imo.
kaichanvong 5y ago
Having been a pro user of Flickr (a group of work colleagues suggested I look into it) for years the site Flickr continues to be "happening" for me; given this site link: http://flickr.kaivong.com http://flickr.kaivong.com. The (techspot.com) headline... as ever, a good one! Though, I'm not one of those users at tech spot? However they are power-users of images -pictures (right?). The cookies on Flickr? Given theres many other links for photography. Offering different directions for keeping your photography (personal or otherwise). For the best photographers? Be careful out there... it is photography! Note: Techspot is a leading technology publication established in 1998.
petre 5y ago
It got ads, aka cancer, which is most cases leads to death. Add an annoying UX into the mix, Verizon, Oath and failure to exist becomes a reality.
stemlord 5y ago
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.
biztos 5y ago
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]. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/smugmug-acquires-flickr https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/smugmug-acquires-flickr [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield [3]: https://youtu.be/0oV4IVy8tvE https://youtu.be/0oV4IVy8tvE
- shostack 5y ago
  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).
  - mthoms 5y ago
    IIRC SmugMug was family owned and run. Perhaps it still is?
    - shostack 5y ago
      Correct and afaik it still is. There were also a few families that had multiple family members working there. It was (and presumably still is) exceptionally family friendly. Even by Bay Area tech standards.
ringworld 5y ago
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.
grumblepeet 5y ago
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 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- greyface- 5y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)
  - krallja 5y ago
    The lesson here is, if Stewart Butterfield starts another MMO, get on the rocket.
    - soneca 5y ago
      But not on the game art or game design department, apply to internal tools team.
  - ollien 5y ago
    Oh man I remember Glitch! I remember waiting for weekends where it was up so I could play. I had no idea it pivoted into Slack. Thanks for sharing!
    - greyface- 5y ago
smm11 5y ago
Flickr out-Myspaced Myspace.
tandav 5y ago
Cool kids moved from flickr to unsplash
- cycomanic 5y ago
  >Unsplash grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos from Unsplash for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or Unsplash. This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service. In other words Unsplash is a creative work donation site. I think this is a very different value proposition than flickr or smugmug. Somewhere else on unsplash it says: >Unsplash has quickly become the internet’s source of visuals—powering everything from Apple keynotes to high school Art projects. By contributing your images, you are pushing creativity forward every day. So it's a website that companies like Apple don't have to pay license fees for images anymore?
  - FireBeyond 5y ago
    Well, a credit "would be appreciated", so they're - maybe - paying in that most valued of currencies, the "exposure buck".
  - fleddr 5y ago
    "This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service." This last line is funny, as they only added it later. They have all this fluffy language about how awesome and humanitarian it is when photos are free of rights or restrictions. Except of course when this freedom is used in a way they don't like.
cycomanic 5y ago
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.
- mthoms 5y ago
  Smugmug was pretty cool except for the Comic Sans (-ish) logo. That thing was so hideous and amateur many people just didn't take them seriously.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    Hey, I shipped a game that used Comic Sans all throughout, and it did ok in spite of the ugly font! https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/comments/awrb09/just_a_friendly_reminder_that_sims_1_used_comic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/comments/awrb09/just_a_frie... Slack (which was founded by the same founder as Flickr, Stewart Butterfield) seems to be doing ok with their Penis Swastika Logo, so it just goes to show how hard it is to predict which designs will be popular. https://boingboing.net/2019/01/16/slacks-new-logo-is-a-playdoh.html https://boingboing.net/2019/01/16/slacks-new-logo-is-a-playd... It could be worse: Wingdings redrawn in the style of Comic Sans to create the "worst font ever": https://boingboing.net/2021/12/29/wingdings-redrawn-in-the-style-of-comic-sans-to-create-the-worst-font-ever.html https://boingboing.net/2021/12/29/wingdings-redrawn-in-the-s... "Comic Dings" Font Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATI2q7M_eMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATI2q7M_eMU
    - mthoms 5y ago
      Right you are about Sims 1... and I did love that game! Kudos. Wingdings as Comic Sans is indeed the stuff of nightmares. I'll be lucky to sleep tonight :-)
neilk 5y ago
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.
- leoh 5y ago
  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.
  - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
    Because if you tell everyone that you are gonna "save" something repeatedly, publicy, even if you know you have failed and it turns out that you are doing the opposite people get sceptical about you and your character.
  - annadane 5y ago
    I'm curious what you think about Zuckerberg
- overeater 5y ago
  > The article just happens to use a photo of Mayer because she was the CEO at the time Flickr was sold to SmugMug. Wait, isn't that just another way of saying that she sold Flicker to SmugMug? If so, she sounds very blamable.
Tylast 5y ago
I was an avid Flickr user before Yahoo seemed to degrade the quality. Specifically for me, many of the groups I was in all of a sudden allowed illustrations as valid photographs. These were NOT photographs....so I moved on from Flickr.
bborud 5y ago
This post made me have another look at Flickr, where I have a pro account just for the sake of my old images not disappearing. It just isn't worth what I'm paying. I'm better off setting up my own static site.
PaulHoule 5y ago
For me photography has been an on and off sort of thing. I went through a phase prior to 2010 when I was serious about Flickr. I tried to get back into it but the user interface seemed unacceptably slow on a DSL connection and it wasn't just that "big photos" were involved but some wider kind of bloat. I got into the "photo sharing" business with my own sites that burned out spectacularly and left me paying AWS bills out of my home equity line of credit. I know a lot of people who crashed and burned with photo sites in that time frame, the real survivors were instagram, snapchat, and pinterest. I had most of my lenses go bad and was down to just a 20mm prime on my Canon body. I lost interest in photography and when I got it back I couldn't find the body so I thought long and hard before jumping into the Sony mirrorless ecosystem. I got a number of quality zoom lenses, but never got my psychology around taking photographs seriously. 18 months ago I got a "free" inkjet printer and challenged myself to print something every day to keep things drying out. Since then it has been a voyage of discovery more than invention and I progressed from anime fan art to art reproductions to photographs I take myself. The central concept is the "three sided card" which is a physical object that has a "digital twin" on the web. My work is driven by the needs of the system and I've been drawn kicking and screaming into taking pictures again, including all of the subjects I couldn't somehow make myself do.
mullingitover 5y ago
Hah. Whatever happened to Instagram? 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 5y ago
  Instagram still doesn't have an iPad app Bizarre considering they have some of the finest iOS developers in the world
  - axiosgunnar 5y ago
    Talk about razor sharp focus. Maybe that‘s why they‘re worth billions?
  - can16358p 5y ago
    Because they absolutely don't need to have it.
    - myko 5y ago
      They don't, but it shows how far behind they are competitors like TikTok who do have a functional iPad app
      - can16358p 5y ago
        They aren't behind. They don't need it. Why bother maintaining another app when almost all the intended audience is on iPhone and the app (albeit simulated and not with a great experience) works on iPad anyway.
LeonidasXIV 5y ago
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.
librarianscott 5y ago
It stopped coming up in search results from any of the major search engines.
nbzso 5y ago
Oh, Flickr. I have good memories created mainly from early communities. Deleted all my pictures in 2015. Instagram killed photography. Facebook killed forums. Google killed RSS. I expect "web3" to kill the web as we know it.:) People stopped caring about classical aesthetics and moved their attention towards dopamine hits, social validation tricks and GAS. So for me photography is dead. I still care around my Leica's, but nowadays all I look for is to capture some reference images for drawing or painting.
dustintrex 5y ago
photo.net is another photo sharing site that really missed the boat. It was basically the Unsplash of the 2000s, with tons of pros and wannabes showcasing their work, but the interface stagnated and I remember that there was violent opposition to allowing resolutions higher than 800x600 or so: all the photographers were petrified that their high-res images would be stolen and used in print ads.
mudlus 5y ago
Flickr is awesome. As Instagram plays out, Flickr, and those that have paid for it for years, will be rewarded with full control over years and years and years of photos. I have full control of tens of thousands of photos I've taken since I was in high school. I LOVE Flickr. hey have excellent customer support, too. I'm less interested in the community aspect, though that is fun, as just the photo storage and organization product. It is indeed leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.
- gromitss 5y ago
SMAAART 5y ago
Innovation happened to Flickr. One of the lesson learned from "The Innovator's Dilemma" is that a market can be disrupted only when it's overserved. In 2007 not Flickr was awesome, and it was not the only game in town, there were other (minor) players, we the users had lots of free choices of where to store and share our photos. Crappy opportunity for just another photo service but fertile opportunity for a disruptive company to come in a takes its lunch. Instagram has entered the room.
1024core 5y ago
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...
- dmd 5y ago
  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.
  - jfo 5y ago
    Great little book, had it recommended to me by a fantastic music teacher of mine in graduate school.
    - kelseyfrog 5y ago
      Genuinely interested in hearing what other people get out of it. I couldn't get past Carse's overwrought use of chiasmus. After finally reaching the end, he places a coy little phrase which falls flat because he spilled the beans 66 sections earlier and it irks me to this day.
      - jfo 5y ago
        I agree that the prose and structure is not the strong point. I appreciated it for giving a clearly articulated alternative to zero sum competitive games. It helped me think about the playfulness of cooperative creativity in a new more holistic way, as well as the idea that it’s worth doing things that you’ll never reach an end of. I don’t doubt that if I read it again I’d share your criticisms though, it’s a thin volume with a very sweet idea at the core of it, at the end of the day.
ineedasername 5y ago
The tldr seems to be that it failed to adapt to the changing user behavior induced by smartphones as massive disruptions in both how content was created and consumed.
jboy55 5y ago
Amazingly no one has brought up the declining sales of DSLR cameras. https://www.statista.com/statistics/799526/shipments-of-digital-singe-lens-reflex-cameras-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/799526/shipments-of-digi... 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 5y ago
  DSLRs have been replaced with mirrorless cameras, some of which are full frame and no less capable.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    These are mostly replacements rather than first cameras. It's still a shrinking niche relative to smartphone photography.
    - throwaway946513 5y ago
      From the looks of it, most people I know who got their first DSLR, including myself, got used or hand-me downs from other photographers who were upgrading their setup for a newer and better body.
mfranc42 5y ago
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.
AlchemistCamp 5y ago
Yahoo! happened to Flickr, just like it did to Delicious and Tumblr.
devwastaken 5y ago
Without Flickr nonprofit advertising work would not be possible for me. Flickr has many users that offer open licensing, it's also used by various government orgs around the world and posts open licensing or public domain works.

241 points by alok-g 5y ago

ssss11 5y ago

Yahoo

dylan604 5y ago
Has there ever been a postive result for the site being purchased be megaCorp? Sure, the founders make out like bandits, but has it ever been a net positive for the site itself?
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  Instagram seems to be doing quite well.
  - zimpenfish 5y ago
    I dunno - my experience using Instagram is that it is radically worse these days. The mobile app doesn't show a chronological feed, doesn't even show me everyone I follow, every 7-8th image is a sponsored ad, they relentlessly push reels which I have no interest in watching into my feed, etc. Even the upload process - which was their huge selling point originally - is slowly becoming more frictional.
- ianhawes 5y ago
  Github
  - mikro2nd 5y ago
    Time will tell.
  - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
    What's the positive result here?
    - acdha 5y ago
      They’ve expanded a lot of services like CI, remote workspaces, etc. which appear to be Azure-adjacent and VSCode beats the pants off of Atom.

pythonic_hell 5y ago

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.

ianlevesque 5y ago
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...
- julius_deane 5y ago
  - reduce freeloading - increase price for paid accounts - focus on serving paid customers > un-sustainable — the orange website
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- muststopmyths 5y ago
  So, I was really pissed off when they said they'd start deleting pictures instead of hiding them like the old Flickr. I was never going to re-upload all my pictures if I decided to go Pro again in the future. So I thought Flickr was effectively dead to me. However, in the 2 years since they announced that, all my 6000+ photos were still there. I never checked to see how many were still publicly visible, though. I wonder if they exposed only the newest 1000 public photos. That might account for the "63% of images lost" stat above. Finally, this fall I needed a photo-sharing site again and decided I still like Flickr with its shitty "new" UI better than most other sites. I particularly like collections of albums and the maps of photos. Plus, the overall UI for browsing an album is simple. No annoying sales-catalog style layouts. I have OneDrive for my camera uploads (habit carried over from Windows Phone) and other private uploads, but anything I want to share publicly will go on Flickr. They had a pretty good sale on Black Friday, so I ended up signing up for a year. Still keep backups of my photos locally of course and I am ready to bail if they change it to look like Smugmug :-)

karmakaze 5y ago

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).

runjake 5y ago
I believe Flickr started off with a white background. I also remember Flickr being an extremely popular site. Then, Yahoo acquired it. Then they started censoring it. Then they neglected it. Then Flickr became effectively a ghost town. Since then, apparently SmugMug has acquired it.

Jabed30 5y ago

[dead]

Jenk 5y ago

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.

AlexandrB 5y ago
They're no longer owned by Yahoo/Oath and are now part of SmugMug.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
rcpt 5y ago
The Yahoo login thing killed me. But I did like the idea of "flickr: photo sharing for people who have Yahoo.com email addresses"
- petre 5y ago
  Death through association.
dpark 5y ago
> transferring ownership of the photos to Flickr, not even attributing the photographers I would love to know what you’re talking about here.

neom 5y ago

"In 2007, Flickr was the most popular dedicated photo-sharing site on the web, and growing exponentially in terms of new images uploaded." Uhm, as far as I remember it, Flickr never surpassed daily actives or daily uploads over DeviantART, not by a long shot. I'm quite sure the photo gallery did considerably more volume than Flickr. Edit- shouldn't have used never: but in 2007 I don't believe that to be true.

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
I find that hard to believe.
acdha 5y ago
I'd be quite surprised if that was true for the timeframe in question: the total number of images for 2015 were roughly the same as Flickr users had uploaded in a single year 8 years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeviantArt#cite_ref-34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeviantArt#cite_ref-34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr#/media/File:How_many_public_photos_are_uploaded_to_Flickr_every_day,_month,_year?_(6855169886).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr#/media/File:How_many_pu... One big confound arrived when Flickr started having automatic uploaders which meant that a lot of accounts had every photo someone took on their phone even if most of them never saw much activity. DeviantArt had deliberation in the upload path so I'd expect lower numbers but higher average quality.
- neom 5y ago
  I have no way of knowing for sure, but I was keeping a close eye on how we did in terms of web traffic at the time, especially when Flickr showed up on the scene, deviantART was in it's peak in 2005, we'd just released dAmn and started putting ajax on the website in a serious way, and release prints in 2006, I can't believe in 2007 Flickr was doing more volume than DeviantART, but it could be true, and I don't really have a way to know for sure, so for sure an anecdote. I know Chris the CTO at the time kicks around HN, maybe he'll chime in. I shouldn't have used never, I don't really know what happened after 2011+, but at least I'd be willing to challenge 2007, but only based on my memory. Edit: Probably another strike against my claim is they said dedicated photo share sites, and dA was an art community, I still suspect the photo gallery at the time was doing more than flickr combined, also, Flickr had it's fair share of Yiffy and Furries during that period.

sircastor 5y ago

I remember Flickr was tremendously popular. It has everything going for it. Anecdotally, one year my wife asked for a paid membership - that indicated to me that they were doing something right as my wife was pretty hesitant to spend money on a service like that. I recall they sort of stopped developing and enhancing it. It died on the vine from neglect. I do recall when Yahoo bought it there was some talk of “fixing Flickr” but I don’t think it ever happened.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

mikotodomo 5y ago

My parents used flickr. I never found out what it does.

mam4 5y ago

Well basically if you are going to make people pay for a photo storage website with a good visualization but somewhat shitty upload system they are just going to flee to a "general file storage" cloud for the same price with a 'slightly shittier' way of viewing them, such as drive or onedrive. (Especially if you threaten to delete already existing photos) Source: i moved to onerive in 2019

leephillips 5y ago
I just took a look at Onedrive. 1TB for $60/year. Flickr is unlimited for $72/yr, and has an API and other conveniences specialized to images. > onedrive
- mam4 5y ago
  6T for 99 dollars with family pack. More than necessary And its not only images. Images are 20% of my cloud only
  - leephillips 5y ago
    So you agree that “same price” is incorrect. But, true of course, Flickr is just for photographs.
    - mam4 5y ago
      Yeah. How many of us did not care for mucv than free storage ? Probably the 50% mentionned ib the article

epa 5y ago

Marissa Mayer, thats what. [1] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17264274/flickr-smugmug-yahoo-oath-verizon-deal-photo-sharing-service-mobile-instagram https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17264274/flickr-smugmug-yahoo-...

bborud 5y ago
You can blame Marissa Mayer for a lot of things. But Flickr was doomed the second they were acquired by Yahoo!.
- dpark 5y ago
  Mayer can’t be blamed for much at yahoo. She was brought in to save a sinking ship and it turned out to be unsalvageable. Steve Jobs couldn’t have turned that one around.
  - bsder 5y ago
    > Mayer can’t be blamed for much at yahoo. She was brought in to save a sinking ship and it turned out to be unsalvageable. Erm, why not? She got paid a ton and failed. She should be blamed. Yahoo absolutely could have been turned around. Yahoo Japan shows that. The problem, like so many CEOs, was lack of clear vision. When you are failing, you have to place the bet and drive it through. Sure, the probability is that you will lose but if you don't then losing becomes a certainty. The problem is that this is anathema to anybody who who was good at the middle management game. You get ahead as a middle manager not by placing big bets but by mostly avoiding failure.
    - dpark 5y ago
      > Erm, why not? She got paid a ton and failed. She should be blamed. Because it’s absurd to only blame the last person in a line of ceos who presided over more than a decade of decline. > Yahoo absolutely could have been turned around. Yahoo Japan shows that. Yahoo Japan was always special. It was not a wholly owned subsidiary and also did not experience the same decline. It wasn’t turned around. It didn’t need a turnaround.

petilon 5y ago

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".

ComputerGuru 5y ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  JC Penney was on its way out, or at least in terminal decline. It did not matter who took the helm, the change to online shopping meant there was going to be consolidation as demand for in person shopping went down. Even Macys is struggling, and now they have a part of the store that sells basically non returnable junk, like a dollar store. There is typically only room for 1 or 2 retail businesses now per market segment (how much customers are willing/able to spend).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hakfoo 5y ago
    Macy's seemed to slide significantly downmarket over the last few decades. I feel like, growing up in the 80s and 90s, in a place where they weren't, it was seen as an upper-tier product, a notch below Neiman-Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue, but decidedly fancier than Penney's or Sears. Then they either went acquisition-mad, or started rebranding other stores they owned (not sure which) because a local chain became Macy's, and it never lived up to that hype. Now they're doing their own take on Kohl's Kash, which just screams "premium retail experience."

simonw 5y ago

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. Then Instagram happened.

kaichanvong 5y ago
good point! Instagram happened!
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  While Instagram and Flickr (at least in theory) serve a different audience. Flickr is for the professional or aspiring amateur photographer, to manage their photos and build show cases. Maybe even selling their photos online. Instagram is a mass market social network
  - simonw 5y ago
    Flickr was a mass market social network back in ~2007 if you squint at it in the right way.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      You'd have to squint very very hard. Certainly lots of people who used Flickr for free online photo storage are on Instagram today. But the social network aspect of Flickr was always pretty focused on the prosumer and, perhaps to a lesser degree, pro base who were willing to pay an annual fee. It's not clear to me that Flickr (and now Flickr/Smugmug) could have co-existed on the same service as Instagram. So the Flickr could have been Instagram narrative, which if true would have been great for the founders, would also have been awful for the most serious users of the Flickr service.

dawolf- 5y ago

flickr has a great API. I am using the flickr API to manage my photography portfolio website. I can organize everything (uploading, naming, ordering, etc.) using the flickr album tools and then just pull it into my site.

Brajeshwar 5y ago

I can't login to Flickr anymore. I tried my Yahoo account (just used for Flickr) but I'm I a loop. Flickr was, perhaps, where it all started with "social photo sharing" and I liked it. Last time I remember, my photos had over 10Million views. I did do a Takeout but I like to still own my account there. I used to give out a lot of Pro memberships to people, mostly students and early aspiring photographers, during the early days.

tomcooks 5y ago

Yahoo, that's what happened. Yahoo and their stupid Yahoo login.

ComputerGuru 5y ago
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). The real damage came later.
- antifa 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean, I've lost my yahoo account permanently due to inactivity.
- acdha 5y ago
  > 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 > The real damage came later. That was the real damage: once Yahoo! bought them, things stagnated except for when they made it worse. The rest of the market didn't stand still while they were by all accounts fighting internal political battles.

severak_cz 5y ago

This is the same problem as with Imgur and it's various clones - https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-online-services.html https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...

dehrmann 5y ago
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.

deanc 5y ago

I've seen a few new photo hosting applications creep up now and then in recent HN threads like this, but none have really hit the spot for me. I take photos as a hobby, nothing too serious, mainly if the weather is nice or we're on vacation. I have a Fujifilm X100F and an old Canon DSLR. I rarely use my Canon. Fuji strikes a perfect balance between on-camera processing (film simulations), quality and mainly size - that it's become my primary driver. There is a subreddit with a plethora of monotonous, uninteresting images with white boards on reddit at /r/fujix. I miss the diversity and creativity of early flickr. Google Photos is my go-to nowadays for hosting photos, and sharing with the family. Everyone I know has a google account, and sharing is super easy. Their UI is the best I have ever used - so quick and snappy and probably the most implementation of infinite scroll I've seen. But it's just that - nothing more. What I really want is something that allows me to do everything. I want to be able to upload my RAW photos and not have to think about it in terms of space or cost (at least not at the current prices). I want to be able to edit them using powerful tools (as in Lightroom or Darktable [my current choice as i refuse to pay for lightroom]) in the same tool I use to upload and manage them. I want to be able to be part of a community of photographers and sharing my photos within that community or namespace/tag should be seamless and I should not have to think too much about the divide between my personal life and my online life. I should be able to really quickly take a family photo album and safely indicate that this is for public consideration outside of that album. I should be able to use machine learning to intelligently and automatically apply a vasty array of tags to my images, only using a cursory glance to validate them. I want it to intelligently classify locations, so if I'm travelling around Austria - I could just say show me photos from west tyrol without needing to enter the exact city or look at some poorly rendered and slow map. The problem with the current solutions, are the division of tools, the division of disciplines, the cost of storage, the shitty UIs, and the difficulty in creating communities around interests, cameras and/or styles.

Terretta 5y ago
> What I really want is something that allows me to do everything. > I refuse to pay…
- deanc 5y ago

leephillips 5y ago

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.

tjr225 5y ago
I used to use Flickr, but iCloud storage is cheaper and more convenient.
- leephillips 5y ago
  Do you need to be an Apple citizen?
  - colecut 5y ago
    Google photos is also pretty cheap and convenient.
    - leephillips 5y ago
      Google storage is 2 TB for $100/yr. Flickr is unlimited for $72/yr.
      - hiptobecubic 5y ago
        IMO they serve very different purposes. Google Photos has very good search and collaborative album building. The result is that you can take random photos of your life and still get value out of it later. It's not archival quality, but it's extremely accessible, which makes up for it, imo.

kaichanvong 5y ago

Having been a pro user of Flickr (a group of work colleagues suggested I look into it) for years the site Flickr continues to be "happening" for me; given this site link: http://flickr.kaivong.com http://flickr.kaivong.com. The (techspot.com) headline... as ever, a good one! Though, I'm not one of those users at tech spot? However they are power-users of images -pictures (right?). The cookies on Flickr? Given theres many other links for photography. Offering different directions for keeping your photography (personal or otherwise). For the best photographers? Be careful out there... it is photography! Note: Techspot is a leading technology publication established in 1998.

petre 5y ago

It got ads, aka cancer, which is most cases leads to death. Add an annoying UX into the mix, Verizon, Oath and failure to exist becomes a reality.

stemlord 5y ago

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.

biztos 5y ago

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]. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/smugmug-acquires-flickr https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/smugmug-acquires-flickr [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield [3]: https://youtu.be/0oV4IVy8tvE https://youtu.be/0oV4IVy8tvE

shostack 5y ago
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).
- mthoms 5y ago
  IIRC SmugMug was family owned and run. Perhaps it still is?
  - shostack 5y ago
    Correct and afaik it still is. There were also a few families that had multiple family members working there. It was (and presumably still is) exceptionally family friendly. Even by Bay Area tech standards.

ringworld 5y ago

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.

grumblepeet 5y ago

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 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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
greyface- 5y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)
- krallja 5y ago
  The lesson here is, if Stewart Butterfield starts another MMO, get on the rocket.
  - soneca 5y ago
    But not on the game art or game design department, apply to internal tools team.
- ollien 5y ago
  Oh man I remember Glitch! I remember waiting for weekends where it was up so I could play. I had no idea it pivoted into Slack. Thanks for sharing!
  - greyface- 5y ago

smm11 5y ago

Flickr out-Myspaced Myspace.

tandav 5y ago

Cool kids moved from flickr to unsplash

cycomanic 5y ago
>Unsplash grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos from Unsplash for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or Unsplash. This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service. In other words Unsplash is a creative work donation site. I think this is a very different value proposition than flickr or smugmug. Somewhere else on unsplash it says: >Unsplash has quickly become the internet’s source of visuals—powering everything from Apple keynotes to high school Art projects. By contributing your images, you are pushing creativity forward every day. So it's a website that companies like Apple don't have to pay license fees for images anymore?
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  Well, a credit "would be appreciated", so they're - maybe - paying in that most valued of currencies, the "exposure buck".
- fleddr 5y ago
  "This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service." This last line is funny, as they only added it later. They have all this fluffy language about how awesome and humanitarian it is when photos are free of rights or restrictions. Except of course when this freedom is used in a way they don't like.

cycomanic 5y ago

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.

mthoms 5y ago
Smugmug was pretty cool except for the Comic Sans (-ish) logo. That thing was so hideous and amateur many people just didn't take them seriously.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Hey, I shipped a game that used Comic Sans all throughout, and it did ok in spite of the ugly font! https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/comments/awrb09/just_a_friendly_reminder_that_sims_1_used_comic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/comments/awrb09/just_a_frie... Slack (which was founded by the same founder as Flickr, Stewart Butterfield) seems to be doing ok with their Penis Swastika Logo, so it just goes to show how hard it is to predict which designs will be popular. https://boingboing.net/2019/01/16/slacks-new-logo-is-a-playdoh.html https://boingboing.net/2019/01/16/slacks-new-logo-is-a-playd... It could be worse: Wingdings redrawn in the style of Comic Sans to create the "worst font ever": https://boingboing.net/2021/12/29/wingdings-redrawn-in-the-style-of-comic-sans-to-create-the-worst-font-ever.html https://boingboing.net/2021/12/29/wingdings-redrawn-in-the-s... "Comic Dings" Font Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATI2q7M_eMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATI2q7M_eMU
  - mthoms 5y ago
    Right you are about Sims 1... and I did love that game! Kudos. Wingdings as Comic Sans is indeed the stuff of nightmares. I'll be lucky to sleep tonight :-)

neilk 5y ago

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.

leoh 5y ago
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.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
  Because if you tell everyone that you are gonna "save" something repeatedly, publicy, even if you know you have failed and it turns out that you are doing the opposite people get sceptical about you and your character.
- annadane 5y ago
  I'm curious what you think about Zuckerberg
overeater 5y ago
> The article just happens to use a photo of Mayer because she was the CEO at the time Flickr was sold to SmugMug. Wait, isn't that just another way of saying that she sold Flicker to SmugMug? If so, she sounds very blamable.

Tylast 5y ago

I was an avid Flickr user before Yahoo seemed to degrade the quality. Specifically for me, many of the groups I was in all of a sudden allowed illustrations as valid photographs. These were NOT photographs....so I moved on from Flickr.

bborud 5y ago

This post made me have another look at Flickr, where I have a pro account just for the sake of my old images not disappearing. It just isn't worth what I'm paying. I'm better off setting up my own static site.

PaulHoule 5y ago

For me photography has been an on and off sort of thing. I went through a phase prior to 2010 when I was serious about Flickr. I tried to get back into it but the user interface seemed unacceptably slow on a DSL connection and it wasn't just that "big photos" were involved but some wider kind of bloat. I got into the "photo sharing" business with my own sites that burned out spectacularly and left me paying AWS bills out of my home equity line of credit. I know a lot of people who crashed and burned with photo sites in that time frame, the real survivors were instagram, snapchat, and pinterest. I had most of my lenses go bad and was down to just a 20mm prime on my Canon body. I lost interest in photography and when I got it back I couldn't find the body so I thought long and hard before jumping into the Sony mirrorless ecosystem. I got a number of quality zoom lenses, but never got my psychology around taking photographs seriously. 18 months ago I got a "free" inkjet printer and challenged myself to print something every day to keep things drying out. Since then it has been a voyage of discovery more than invention and I progressed from anime fan art to art reproductions to photographs I take myself. The central concept is the "three sided card" which is a physical object that has a "digital twin" on the web. My work is driven by the needs of the system and I've been drawn kicking and screaming into taking pictures again, including all of the subjects I couldn't somehow make myself do.

mullingitover 5y ago

Hah. Whatever happened to Instagram? 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 5y ago
Instagram still doesn't have an iPad app Bizarre considering they have some of the finest iOS developers in the world
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  Talk about razor sharp focus. Maybe that‘s why they‘re worth billions?
- can16358p 5y ago
  Because they absolutely don't need to have it.
  - myko 5y ago
    They don't, but it shows how far behind they are competitors like TikTok who do have a functional iPad app
    - can16358p 5y ago
      They aren't behind. They don't need it. Why bother maintaining another app when almost all the intended audience is on iPhone and the app (albeit simulated and not with a great experience) works on iPad anyway.

LeonidasXIV 5y ago

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.

librarianscott 5y ago

It stopped coming up in search results from any of the major search engines.

nbzso 5y ago

Oh, Flickr. I have good memories created mainly from early communities. Deleted all my pictures in 2015. Instagram killed photography. Facebook killed forums. Google killed RSS. I expect "web3" to kill the web as we know it.:) People stopped caring about classical aesthetics and moved their attention towards dopamine hits, social validation tricks and GAS. So for me photography is dead. I still care around my Leica's, but nowadays all I look for is to capture some reference images for drawing or painting.

dustintrex 5y ago

photo.net is another photo sharing site that really missed the boat. It was basically the Unsplash of the 2000s, with tons of pros and wannabes showcasing their work, but the interface stagnated and I remember that there was violent opposition to allowing resolutions higher than 800x600 or so: all the photographers were petrified that their high-res images would be stolen and used in print ads.

mudlus 5y ago

Flickr is awesome. As Instagram plays out, Flickr, and those that have paid for it for years, will be rewarded with full control over years and years and years of photos. I have full control of tens of thousands of photos I've taken since I was in high school. I LOVE Flickr. hey have excellent customer support, too. I'm less interested in the community aspect, though that is fun, as just the photo storage and organization product. It is indeed leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.

gromitss 5y ago

SMAAART 5y ago

Innovation happened to Flickr. One of the lesson learned from "The Innovator's Dilemma" is that a market can be disrupted only when it's overserved. In 2007 not Flickr was awesome, and it was not the only game in town, there were other (minor) players, we the users had lots of free choices of where to store and share our photos. Crappy opportunity for just another photo service but fertile opportunity for a disruptive company to come in a takes its lunch. Instagram has entered the room.

1024core 5y ago

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...

dmd 5y ago
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.
- jfo 5y ago
  Great little book, had it recommended to me by a fantastic music teacher of mine in graduate school.
  - kelseyfrog 5y ago
    Genuinely interested in hearing what other people get out of it. I couldn't get past Carse's overwrought use of chiasmus. After finally reaching the end, he places a coy little phrase which falls flat because he spilled the beans 66 sections earlier and it irks me to this day.
    - jfo 5y ago
      I agree that the prose and structure is not the strong point. I appreciated it for giving a clearly articulated alternative to zero sum competitive games. It helped me think about the playfulness of cooperative creativity in a new more holistic way, as well as the idea that it’s worth doing things that you’ll never reach an end of. I don’t doubt that if I read it again I’d share your criticisms though, it’s a thin volume with a very sweet idea at the core of it, at the end of the day.

ineedasername 5y ago

The tldr seems to be that it failed to adapt to the changing user behavior induced by smartphones as massive disruptions in both how content was created and consumed.

jboy55 5y ago

Amazingly no one has brought up the declining sales of DSLR cameras. https://www.statista.com/statistics/799526/shipments-of-digital-singe-lens-reflex-cameras-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/799526/shipments-of-digi... 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 5y ago
DSLRs have been replaced with mirrorless cameras, some of which are full frame and no less capable.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  These are mostly replacements rather than first cameras. It's still a shrinking niche relative to smartphone photography.
  - throwaway946513 5y ago
    From the looks of it, most people I know who got their first DSLR, including myself, got used or hand-me downs from other photographers who were upgrading their setup for a newer and better body.

mfranc42 5y ago

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.

AlchemistCamp 5y ago

Yahoo! happened to Flickr, just like it did to Delicious and Tumblr.

devwastaken 5y ago

Without Flickr nonprofit advertising work would not be possible for me. Flickr has many users that offer open licensing, it's also used by various government orgs around the world and posts open licensing or public domain works.