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Absolutely not. The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered. They aren't going to out engineer or out pace any sm

by jmathai 14y ago

Absolutely not. The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered. They aren't going to out engineer or out pace any smaller competitor. Basically, the only thing they have is gone and is going to be very hard to get back. In Internet speak they abused their community by abandoning them for years. By "they" I mean the bureaucracy I came to know so well while at Yahoo!. And no, Marissa Mayer can't save the day on this one. Facebook won the casual social sharing of photos and 500px is winning on the "professional" side. Disclaimer: I'm a founder of OpenPhoto. We're not fighting the same fight as Flickr though so I'm an external party on this specific topic.

kaiuhl 14y ago
Just because you have the institutional memory of Flickr during its fall from grace doesn't mean the rest of the internet, particularly the younger generation, does. Instagram has proven that social networking around "artistic" photos has an audience. If Flickr can be the more professional, big-boy Instagram (maybe even with a website!), then I can see it attracting a new audience.
- jmathai 14y ago
  But what I'm saying is that it is more likely that someone else wins that race. The only thing Flickr has going for it is their existing community who have largely abandoned it. They're not going acquire a "new" community better than their smaller competitors. Case in point. It took them years to release mobile apps. Then a year to release a major update. That's millenniums on the Internet. If you think Yahoo! can change that, well, you haven't worked there :).
  - mc32 14y ago
    I think Flickr still has the chance to rescue itself. There are still some vibrant communities. Say you want to learn/discuss wedding photography, or maybe you want to learn about portraiture photography, or staged photography, there are very active and content rich communities. What flickr can do is expand on the tools they've provided those communities. Right now, there are a few sticking points: -Comments --they're not sortable, they don't have a mechanism to up/down vote relevant irrelevant comments. -Search --it's horrible. Searching for a comment/thread you kind of recall and want to find? Lost cause. -Galleries --they need to improve this. If you want to curate and showcase a theme, whatever, it's very difficult to do, aside from creating side-groups. -Accepting/curating photos into pools. They need to introduce 'AND' in addition to the 'OR' mechanism to allow images into pools which require admins to 'approve' images. -A way to 'elect' admins by the members. Admins tend to tire after a few year and allow their groups to wither. The solution now is to go and create your own group. That loses lots of rich history (discussion threads). It would be nice to be able to 'vote' in new admins, in groups which elect to be set-up that way. LSS, if they revamp some core functionality and improve the communication tools (and adding something akin to @messaging), they have an eager audience. Lots of the 'serious' users, actually do care about their communities and actually follow the managerial follies always hopeful that things will change for the better --sure some have left for FB, 500px. Some of those have found that FB incurs a cost -the cost of not being able to have aliases, privacy issues, etc.
    - jmathai 14y ago
      You're probably right. Especially if you're involved in one of those. I'm not, so it's a side of Flickr I don't see.
bigiain 14y ago
"The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered." It's also got the inertia of it's existing userbase - each year my renewal comes up, and I think "Do I _really_ want to pay for this again?", then I think "But is it worth saving $25 but having to move all the photos I have up here, and deal with having links to them break?" and I just pay up again. One day, I suspect I'll start storing photos elsewhere, but I'll probably choose to not only export all my Flickr photos and re upload them to the new place, but also choose to keep paying Flickr for long enough that I don't care too much about all the forum and blog posts pout there embedding Flickr urls - that's quite likely to represent another 5 years of Flickr subscription, even if they don't offer me anything except continuing service of the photos/videos on their current URLs. (My Flickr stats show long-tail trickles of image views from forums I've not been on in 3 or 4 years, at least some of which I'd be sad if the people looking for that sort of specific information (in my case, a lot of repair and service information for late 1990's Ducati Monsters) ended up with a bunch of broken image links)
- justincormack 14y ago
  My subscription just expired and I can't decide what to do... Last year I gave them one more chance. I guess they have shipped something, although I use Android...
  - jmathai 14y ago
    Drop %6.95 to renew your membership for 3 months. Just enough time to export them all to OpenPhoto :). https://openphoto.me https://openphoto.me
    - bigiain 14y ago
      I've got an openphoto account. The friction I feel each subscription time is all the places out there on the internet that are linking to my Flickr pictures with the Flickr urls. It's worth ~$25/yr to not even consider going and finding all the places I've got pictures linked out of my Flickr account and working out how to update them (if it's even possible). I could very easily store all my own photos in S3, but I can't easily go back and update old urls, and hey - $25 isn't _that_ much…
neilk 14y ago
> Facebook won the casual social sharing of photos and 500px is winning on the "professional" side. There's probably room for a lot of different kinds of photo sharing apps. Even ones that the tech press or hackers don't care about. Shutterfly pulls in hundreds of millions dollars a year, mostly from paper products related to uploaded photos. Like photos for your kids' softball team. Flickr can't be the next Flickr, because when Flickr was Flickr it was the only app of its kind. People really were doing a lot of different activities on the site; photos were the media object to organize it around. Back in 2005, it was Twitter, Facebook, LiveStream, Tumblr, YouTube, etc., all in one. Whatever Flickr is going forward, it will probably be more narrow and more deep. I'm not sure they can win as an all-things-to-all-people photos site.
dmd 14y ago
The other thing Flickr has going for it is they're still the ONLY one out there that has decent support for metadata. I've tried Smugmug, I've tried OpenPhoto, I've tried Gallery (v2 and v3), and Flickr is still the only one that seems to understand concepts like (for instance) "the tag 'Joe Schmo' should not be displayed or (god forbid) SAVED as 'joeschmo'". And nobody but Flickr has the (really, really great) Guest Pass feature, where you can share private photos with people WITHOUT forcing them to sign up for something.
- jmathai 14y ago
  There's even more features that Flickr is the only service to have. They're ahead in many areas but the speed at which they've been adding new features is significantly slower than others. It's just a matter of time before other services replicate the features Flickr has today which are valuable. Remember, they've been around for 8 or so years. It takes time to get to where they are today. But 8 years from now, it won't be Flickr we're talking about.

by jmathai 14y ago

kaiuhl 14y ago

Just because you have the institutional memory of Flickr during its fall from grace doesn't mean the rest of the internet, particularly the younger generation, does. Instagram has proven that social networking around "artistic" photos has an audience. If Flickr can be the more professional, big-boy Instagram (maybe even with a website!), then I can see it attracting a new audience.

jmathai 14y ago
But what I'm saying is that it is more likely that someone else wins that race. The only thing Flickr has going for it is their existing community who have largely abandoned it. They're not going acquire a "new" community better than their smaller competitors. Case in point. It took them years to release mobile apps. Then a year to release a major update. That's millenniums on the Internet. If you think Yahoo! can change that, well, you haven't worked there :).
- mc32 14y ago
  I think Flickr still has the chance to rescue itself. There are still some vibrant communities. Say you want to learn/discuss wedding photography, or maybe you want to learn about portraiture photography, or staged photography, there are very active and content rich communities. What flickr can do is expand on the tools they've provided those communities. Right now, there are a few sticking points: -Comments --they're not sortable, they don't have a mechanism to up/down vote relevant irrelevant comments. -Search --it's horrible. Searching for a comment/thread you kind of recall and want to find? Lost cause. -Galleries --they need to improve this. If you want to curate and showcase a theme, whatever, it's very difficult to do, aside from creating side-groups. -Accepting/curating photos into pools. They need to introduce 'AND' in addition to the 'OR' mechanism to allow images into pools which require admins to 'approve' images. -A way to 'elect' admins by the members. Admins tend to tire after a few year and allow their groups to wither. The solution now is to go and create your own group. That loses lots of rich history (discussion threads). It would be nice to be able to 'vote' in new admins, in groups which elect to be set-up that way. LSS, if they revamp some core functionality and improve the communication tools (and adding something akin to @messaging), they have an eager audience. Lots of the 'serious' users, actually do care about their communities and actually follow the managerial follies always hopeful that things will change for the better --sure some have left for FB, 500px. Some of those have found that FB incurs a cost -the cost of not being able to have aliases, privacy issues, etc.
  - jmathai 14y ago
    You're probably right. Especially if you're involved in one of those. I'm not, so it's a side of Flickr I don't see.

bigiain 14y ago

"The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered." It's also got the inertia of it's existing userbase - each year my renewal comes up, and I think "Do I _really_ want to pay for this again?", then I think "But is it worth saving $25 but having to move all the photos I have up here, and deal with having links to them break?" and I just pay up again. One day, I suspect I'll start storing photos elsewhere, but I'll probably choose to not only export all my Flickr photos and re upload them to the new place, but also choose to keep paying Flickr for long enough that I don't care too much about all the forum and blog posts pout there embedding Flickr urls - that's quite likely to represent another 5 years of Flickr subscription, even if they don't offer me anything except continuing service of the photos/videos on their current URLs. (My Flickr stats show long-tail trickles of image views from forums I've not been on in 3 or 4 years, at least some of which I'd be sad if the people looking for that sort of specific information (in my case, a lot of repair and service information for late 1990's Ducati Monsters) ended up with a bunch of broken image links)

justincormack 14y ago
My subscription just expired and I can't decide what to do... Last year I gave them one more chance. I guess they have shipped something, although I use Android...
- jmathai 14y ago
  Drop %6.95 to renew your membership for 3 months. Just enough time to export them all to OpenPhoto :). https://openphoto.me https://openphoto.me
  - bigiain 14y ago
    I've got an openphoto account. The friction I feel each subscription time is all the places out there on the internet that are linking to my Flickr pictures with the Flickr urls. It's worth ~$25/yr to not even consider going and finding all the places I've got pictures linked out of my Flickr account and working out how to update them (if it's even possible). I could very easily store all my own photos in S3, but I can't easily go back and update old urls, and hey - $25 isn't _that_ much…

neilk 14y ago

> Facebook won the casual social sharing of photos and 500px is winning on the "professional" side. There's probably room for a lot of different kinds of photo sharing apps. Even ones that the tech press or hackers don't care about. Shutterfly pulls in hundreds of millions dollars a year, mostly from paper products related to uploaded photos. Like photos for your kids' softball team. Flickr can't be the next Flickr, because when Flickr was Flickr it was the only app of its kind. People really were doing a lot of different activities on the site; photos were the media object to organize it around. Back in 2005, it was Twitter, Facebook, LiveStream, Tumblr, YouTube, etc., all in one. Whatever Flickr is going forward, it will probably be more narrow and more deep. I'm not sure they can win as an all-things-to-all-people photos site.

dmd 14y ago

The other thing Flickr has going for it is they're still the ONLY one out there that has decent support for metadata. I've tried Smugmug, I've tried OpenPhoto, I've tried Gallery (v2 and v3), and Flickr is still the only one that seems to understand concepts like (for instance) "the tag 'Joe Schmo' should not be displayed or (god forbid) SAVED as 'joeschmo'". And nobody but Flickr has the (really, really great) Guest Pass feature, where you can share private photos with people WITHOUT forcing them to sign up for something.

jmathai 14y ago
There's even more features that Flickr is the only service to have. They're ahead in many areas but the speed at which they've been adding new features is significantly slower than others. It's just a matter of time before other services replicate the features Flickr has today which are valuable. Remember, they've been around for 8 or so years. It takes time to get to where they are today. But 8 years from now, it won't be Flickr we're talking about.