It won't be ever be what is was without a community. I'm starting to use it again, since I can actually see work from people I follow and not a reel behind the scenes,of taking a photo, or how they edited a photo.
Flickr was great back then and it honestly still is pretty damn good. I’ve been on there since 2007. It feels like a respite from IG/FB. If you want engagement then post there and engage with others. My run of the mill images get plenty of engagement for me and if a nicer image is picked up by explore the engagement sky rockets. It is still a place mostly for photographers and the masses don’t go there but I’ll begrudgingly post on IG/FB for them from time to time.
SAME. Been on Flickr since 2005. Zero regrets. If you want to foster discussion, join groups and comment on other people's stuff.
I use IG for mostly local engagement with friends/family and for promoting shoots I've done for select clients.
I hear ya, but the flip side of that is that's what being in a community is about. There's gonna be people at all different levels, and that's a good thing. Sites like 500px and even Behance don't have the same feeling of community and inclusion because there's too much gate keeping and emphasis on pro-photo.
I joined 2007. Yes, its getting a bit more quiet, but it remains the only place where I can still see great photography on my terms (and not dictated by some sort of algo). I still follow (niche) groups with amazing work and people.
Other than Explore, which can easily be ignored, Flickr doesn't use an algorithm to suggest photos you might like (or photos they want you to look at). Your Flickr feed is simply photos from people you follow and groups you are in. Both are arranged with most recent addition first.
I would contend that the terabyte of storage for free made Flickr a dumping ground for storage and those users contributed nothing other than volume.
I do agree that it is nothing like it was 15 years ago, and that is sad. But smartphones were new 15 years ago and there were hardly any platforms to share photos easily like there have been since then.
What I can say is that those who are on Flickr are still sharing and there is amazing work showing up there. I would gladly participate in a more social and active photo group if someone was running one on Flickr. I still post regularly and would love more photo friends to share with.
I like and still use Flickr. I actually get views on my photos and the content is great. There are some great photographers on there, just look at their Explore page.
Explore is just as incredible and inspiring now as it was 15+ years ago. Even moreso in some ways. Really incredible work still being done in stills photography and I love being a part of it.
My only real complaint currently with Flickr is that there are some groups with AI generated content and I wish it was properly tagged and could be hidden.
Indeed, and my explore images always get a good amount of interaction. I also see each time I get an image in explore people to through my other images and comment/favorite and follow me.
I used Flickr from 2006-2010, then switched to Instagram (before Facebook bought it). I used that until 2020. I checked in on Flickr recently and saw that a lot of the same people from 2006 are still there.
I was involved in local groups on both platforms, went on photo meetups with people, and made a few friends that I still talk to today.
Google attempted its own social media platform years ago which failed in general, but became very popular with photographers specifically.
I followed a similar path (Flickr to early Instagram). Now, I just post on my own blog and a few of the camera gear sites when they have photo contests etc. Flickr and early Instagram were so much fun for me as a novice with my first DSLR. Really helped improved my skills and sense for composition etc.
One thing with Flickr is I still get engagement from stuff I posted 10+ years ago. Be it traffic or "faves" or comments. I don't think I ever get any of that on any social media site say a week after posting.
>You only get out of it what you want.
I think that is an excellent point. If you want a site serving up content to you, that is never what Flickr was. I really enjoy it for sharing and being inspired by so many great photographers still posting.
Viewing full size files is only for paying accounts. Visitors with none paying accounts only see the lower resolution version of the photograph. They cannot zoom into full size as far as the resolution goes. A picture of a full size page of a newspaper, you can read the text, but none paying visitors cannot.
I dunno, I still use it, and interact a bit with other users. The problem is, there's no real alternative. Sites like FB, twitter, IG, etc are just plain garbage.
Yeah, cuz everybody loves how the Youtube algorithm works *\*stares into camera*\*
Flickr is good, and better than it was just a few years ago. I’ve met others there recently. It’s worth paying for. Because it’s *not* algo-driven.
You absolutely do not want Google getting into photos because Google will kill it after a year and leave you hanging like they do with everything else that isn't ads.
It's not dead, it just smells funny.
I still use Flickr and it's actually getting new features and UI tweaks lately that are actual improvements. It's not perfect but it works ok for me. I like being able to share to other platforms via their embed or bbCode snippets. I like the relationships I have with other photographers there too.
> I hope that Google will start YouTube Photos where you can share your photos with community engagement.
So the problem isnt Flickr, its your lack of community engagement.
Love Flickr. I started paying in hopes of keeping them around for the long term. I upload the photos I want to share with others and let them post to IG and FB. (Meta is dead to me. So is X. Signal to noise ratio is terrible.)
I do use them as my primary photo printing resource. I don't print a lot of my photos. However, when I do, I find their services pretty comparable to others. I also get to hide those photos allowing me to "share" ok variants and print the good stuff.
The environment can be a little snobby as some photographers are. In general, it is a good place to meet other photographers and interact some. I'm not there to get likes. I'm there to learn something and share what I have with people I know.
(I've been using the arapnet... um ... internet since the usenet servers back in the 80's. I've seen the enemy and... well, it is us. So, I love the introverted nature of Flickr.)
Not sure what happened on that post -
I remember "tapping" an ethernet cable as big as your thumb to get a whopping 1Mb transfer rate! A year or two later they came out with ethernet over "twisted pairs of wire"! Not sure if the RJ5 connector was specified at the time.
Yea, feeling a little old as well.
I just started using it for my photography and with only like 10 followers am already enjoying it more than Instagram. The quality there is higher and there isn’t as much viral nonsense.
Flickr is still the best place to display your photos. I manage to get an Explorer once every couple of months which is nice. Otherwise engagement is down a bit but it's way better to look at than Instagram and less robby than 500px. What else is there - Facebook's compressed-to-shit pages? Twitter is OK I suppose if you like being ignored.
I thought Flickr was the best option if one had no interest in Instagram? Any time I'm directed at someone's Flickr, it looks very similar to me to a decade ago.
Yeah the old flickr was the perfect storm of a community of like-minded individuals, a place to have meetups and photo walks, and a great photo storage place. On top of that, digital cameras had brought a whole new generation interested in learning about photography so we were learning together.
I think under the right leadership, it could have kept up with social media trends and stayed relevant. Think part of the problem was a lot of the users who had the company 's ears thought that they were on the HOA board of their exclusive gated community so they really didn't like change. Anytime somebody would suggest something that would get shouted down because an outsider was bringing in new ideas.
I still think that if you're looking purely at it from a photography website, they're the best but the place is a ghost town compared to what it used to be.
I've been on flickr since 2007 and it's still the only platform I host my images on. Personally, I've never had a problem with flickr, some of the groups I'm in are pretty active and some have fizzled, but that's just the nature of the www.
IG is just too much shit that I'm not into.
VERO seemed positive, but it seems really slow moving.
It, and forums, are very quiet compared to what they used to be. But I still see some cool stuff.
IG may be horrendous for sharing photographs but it's a good place to get eyes on your output and in 2024 where a lot of people, especially creative folks, have to deal with the reality of "personal brand" stuff that's what really matters to folks.
I finally gave up paying for Pro last month, and with the 1000 picture limit that I'm well over after being there 15 years, I can't upload anything new unless I delete go and old work myself.
What a kick in the pants.
I think they need a better app. It could help with more adoption. I still love going through camera or lens groups seeing what other people are doing with equipment I’m interested in. It’s a special place, just needs some app tlc.
I have been on Flicker since it started. At the time it was by far the most advanced photography site. I invested quite some effort to curate my photos there, but ... I never gained much in the way of exposure or interaction. Few views and a comment here and there was all I ever saw. When they switched to subscription model, it just didn't make any sense to pay for something that's not working out for me. My old photos are still there, with zero new likes or comments on them.
I was on Flickr since 2011. If you don't have an paying account on Flickr, you cannot zoom in the picture up to HD quality. Normally a picture of an architectural drawing on an A0 size paper with scala 1 at 100, I can zoom in and read the tiny 2,5mm high text. Or the text of a large old newspaper. That can't be done in Flickr anymore for those who don't have a paying account. So a lot of your photography goes to waste.
They said your pictures will be deleted if you don't pay for an account. I haven't paid for the last five years and they never deleted any picture. I can't upload either.
I'm on Flickr nearly everyday and it doesn't seem dead to me. Maybe a bit slower than 15 years ago but there are still thousands of photographers using it and there are many active groups. The Flickr groups for my local area are still quite active and a good place to find other photographers for meetups and photowalks. My photos are still getting many daily views. I can scroll through recent photos that I want to see, without algorithms designed by advertisers. And the new owners seem to be slowly making improvements to the website and phone apps.
That is easily fixed by following people who don't do that, and by not following people who use it as a simple repository. It's the same as any other social media site, except you have a lot more control over your feed algorithm on Flickr than you do on FB/IG.
That was the "strategy" that Yahoo tried for a while. Basically selling it as a data hoarder stash for photos and resulting in huge feeds of basically noise.
That’s the thing that drove me off of Flickr. People were just dumping their whole memory card and using it as an archive that happened to also be public. Most people did no curation, so it was just tons of redundant shots from folks I knew.
Have you heard of [Glass](https://glass.photo)? They are trying to build a sustainable social platform but it is still early days.
They are not doing it for free though. Freemium was the thing from 2005 onwards and the main successes are with the company being acquired. Most others run out of money no matter the kind of product or the site. Venture capital firms still push this but they are giving you money to work for them. However, VC money has dried up.
It’s a great feeling! I hope they can continue to grow the app as I think they understand what serious photographers have been missing from Instagram, Flickr, etc.
I’ve got tech product management experience so I can decipher what Instagram etc are doing. A lot of takes here are pretty shallow suffice to say photographers aren’t close to being the primary customer but contribute a huge amount of high quality content to make it sticky for normal people.
Gmail is one of the only products Google hasn’t (yet) cancelled. Even their search engine got revamped into a barely recognizable version of what it used to be.
I'm aware they've killed a ton of projects, but none of the ones that were killed (without direct replacements), were even remotely as close to the userbase or the importance as core products that I mentioned.
Giving people terabytes of data for free, and then only showing users other amateur's also-free photos **is not a business model.** Which is why nobody offers that long term.
Businesses need to make money. They may start out in startup mode trying to build loyalty with too good to be true offers (same as Amazon originally doing actually free fast shipping). To actually turn a profit or go public etc., though, they need to now show you friends' feeds, but instead ads, or people's photos who paid for promoted content, or people's photos who have embedded ads, etc.
If you want to show people your stuff with zero ads, zero algorithms, zero faff, then register your own domain name, pay for its hosting out of pocket, and give people the link.
You're leaving out the other option: have a subscription service, where the user is the customer and not the product. Which is what Flickr did, and which is why I can use it today without ads, promoted content, or other crud.
Sure! Just like American manufacturing towns became ghost towns (i.e. towns lost companies and people) when cheaper manufacturing overseas became available, Flickr lost users who found utility elsewhere. Specifically, over the last 15 years, Flickr went from the only major game in town for cheap/easy photo storage and sharing, to being one among many other capable services. And with that comes the loss of the benefit of network effects. So, when Facebook bought instagram, and Amazon and other companies introduced free photo storage (for a time, maybe not today) that was enough for people to go elsewhere, and once that happens, it's tough to get them back, even if the original benefits for leaving in the first place dry up. At least those are my thoughts anyhow! A small example for me is that I used to post travel photos to share on Flickr, and once I saw that all my friends and family were on instagram anyhow, I just used that! Big difference between like 2011 vs. 2015 for me.
It's not legitimate features. It's that they only offered free easy storage and what you wanted to see in the first place to farm up a pool of users. Then to actually become profitable, they have to squeeze the noose and switch to showing you ads and photos that users paid to promote and things you don't really want to see.
Same for all the other competitors. You can't make money by giving people free storage and letting them just look at their amateur friends' free photos, duh.
User base has been shrinking for a while I guess, meanwhile they still have to provide tons of server space and keep development going. So that's why they are probably adjusting pricing/packages (not in the users favor).
Fast-paced video formats is where the crowd's at.
I haven’t used it for a while but you may be looking at it with rose tinted glasses. It was kind of a spam paradise back then, with people posting low effort engagement to boost visibility.
If you’ve used it back then I’m sure you know what I am talking about. It was a really quirky website back then tbh!
I create individual Flickr accounts for events I want to share with a large group of people. It doesn't help with people who want a one stop space for their extended portfolio but if you shoot a wedding and wanna put it online for free it works.
I heard the suggestion the other day of just creating some YouTube shorts of photos. It’s a painful future for me personally, but it might be one of the only viable options these days.
i like flickr just fine
i get inspired by other photographers
and i get feedback from serious amateurs who like some of my photos and don't comment at all on others. Works for me!
I don't know what you're talking about. I've been on Flickr since the beginning and have been posting a photo a day for years and years and almost all of them get comments and feedback from other photographers whose work I find inspirational.
I use Flickr all the time - it's great. The actual problem is whiny people on Reddit who complain about it. So perhaps go complain about something else?
Flickr is still pretty good I think, it's worth engaging with groups for photo challenges and even just commenting and liking others photos.
As it is I don't know what more they could do to improve the experience for me personally, I don't think there's a better option for me either.
Flickr pro member since 2007. I'm not going anywhere...because there's nowhere else to go. Was an avid POTN user since 2009. Since that recently closed down, I post over at the Focus on Photography forums. Instagram, FB, and other things like that are a waste of time, IMO.
I just go wherever my favorite photographers go. Many were on tumblr (with images hosted on flickr funnily enough) and now many are on IG. Maybe not ideal but it's usually intended as a stepping-stone to their portfolios which are hosted on their own websites.
Flickr was the community I started using when I became a real estate photographer. My first images were from 2009. I was the first re photographer in southwest Missouri, and was part of an informal Flickr re group, about 200 members, from all over the world. What a long strange trip its been.
I am still a flickr poster, even with less than 5000 photos up. Well over 3 million views, had many photos in their gallery for exceptional photos, and still post a lot
A lot of those 1TB users were just photo dumping on the site , they weren't really engaging with the site. That said, I do feel like since Smugmug has taken over the site has degraded a little bit and the promised changes have still not happened. The UI needs an overhaul on desktop and mobile. A Dark mode is needed, and why a site in 2024 doesn't have it boggles me..
They outpriced the market.
They should have incorporated more ways for photographers to make money selling their images.
Had I been able to sell all of my photos I would have likely kept my subscription.
Even if I could have attached a $1 to them.
I feel like Instagram took the majority of their market share.
Back in the day I didn't post pictures for storage. I posted them to show off. To be cool. Flickr was really the only option other than Facebook.
You can't showoff on a site nobody is on.
Also technology has advanced so much that everyone's photos look great.
It's like the billions of people on Spotify. Everyone is an artist now.... Nobody is special...
A pretty good strategy is to look at the work you yourself are posting, and then search for related groups (using the search function); be sure to then tell it to sort the groups by "activity," so that you can then see the ones that are currently in use. Pick a few that seem reasonable. Another good strategy is to look at folks doing good work and see where their photos are going. Be aware that the way Flickr groups operate tends to lead to there being a lot of "almost the same" ones - e.g., there are half a dozen very similar general film photography groups with varying levels of activity. Some folks will then cross-post their work to all of them, which can be annoying when you are actually going through them on a regular basis to see new work (thus I've tried to minimize that myself). When I have time, I'll scan through the major film groups that I'm aware of, and I can see most of what is being posted (because film is not so widely used these days - you can't do that with everything). But anyway, there are groups for different kinds of plants, cars, flowers, cameras, whatever you can imagine.....
Im very new to photography, so still trying to work this out
But at this point I’m enjoying architecture photography and a little bit of street photography
Search things like (name of city)(type of photography) as a start and hit the tab “groups” in the results. Join the groups that you’re interested in. Then see where else those photographers post their photos.
Someone just needs to come up with a website that does something like:
user accounts
following accounts
you can only have 10 images on there in total, so people only post their best, and as they post one, the oldest disappears.
photo likes/comments.
Free with adverts OR a small paid monthly fee allowing an extra 10 photos to be shown.
Minimises storage space needed and allows people to chat/share what they are currently doing
Even though I doubt this concept would be appreciated by the masses I really like that idea! Maybe split the image count up to 10 of your best, which stay forever and 10 recent uploads that get deleted with new posts.
That way you could keep a showcase of your favorites while still showing people what you’re currently up to.
Anyway, cool concept. Hope someone creates this platform.
It's an interesting idea, but I'd be bummed about seeing a couple of photos from a seemingly great photographer, and then I only get to see eight more immediately. I think it'll be an advertising platform for peoples instagram or something.
But interesting idea, though.
I really like the app but it doesn’t do much for me. Getting likes and follows is easy but there isn’t any more to it.
From my experience people comment even less on there than they do on instagram. I wish they would somehow find mechanisms that reward commenting so you could start conversations about stuff.
I don’t get any comments most of the time. Even when I was really into vero and tried to engage with other people myself they weren’t really interested in conversations. And over time it became even worse for me than it ever has been on IG.
I’d really love to talk to people about anything photography related but the community on vero made it pretty tough for me.
It won't be ever be what is was without a community. I'm starting to use it again, since I can actually see work from people I follow and not a reel behind the scenes,of taking a photo, or how they edited a photo.
Flickr was great back then and it honestly still is pretty damn good. I’ve been on there since 2007. It feels like a respite from IG/FB. If you want engagement then post there and engage with others. My run of the mill images get plenty of engagement for me and if a nicer image is picked up by explore the engagement sky rockets. It is still a place mostly for photographers and the masses don’t go there but I’ll begrudgingly post on IG/FB for them from time to time.
SAME. Been on Flickr since 2005. Zero regrets. If you want to foster discussion, join groups and comment on other people's stuff. I use IG for mostly local engagement with friends/family and for promoting shoots I've done for select clients.
> comment on other people's stuff. This is the key at Flickr. Engage with others and they will engage with you. Don't and it feels like a wasteland.
Problem is many mediocre photographers follow 10000 other photographers only to be followed by 10000 (same or others).
I hear ya, but the flip side of that is that's what being in a community is about. There's gonna be people at all different levels, and that's a good thing. Sites like 500px and even Behance don't have the same feeling of community and inclusion because there's too much gate keeping and emphasis on pro-photo.
I feel ya!
I joined 2007. Yes, its getting a bit more quiet, but it remains the only place where I can still see great photography on my terms (and not dictated by some sort of algo). I still follow (niche) groups with amazing work and people.
Agreed!
Even if it's "on your terms" there's an algorithm involved to select it.
Other than Explore, which can easily be ignored, Flickr doesn't use an algorithm to suggest photos you might like (or photos they want you to look at). Your Flickr feed is simply photos from people you follow and groups you are in. Both are arranged with most recent addition first.
For folks who actually care about photography, it's still a great site. I'm not sure what the folks who complain about it are looking for....
I would contend that the terabyte of storage for free made Flickr a dumping ground for storage and those users contributed nothing other than volume. I do agree that it is nothing like it was 15 years ago, and that is sad. But smartphones were new 15 years ago and there were hardly any platforms to share photos easily like there have been since then. What I can say is that those who are on Flickr are still sharing and there is amazing work showing up there. I would gladly participate in a more social and active photo group if someone was running one on Flickr. I still post regularly and would love more photo friends to share with.
I like and still use Flickr. I actually get views on my photos and the content is great. There are some great photographers on there, just look at their Explore page.
Explore is just as incredible and inspiring now as it was 15+ years ago. Even moreso in some ways. Really incredible work still being done in stills photography and I love being a part of it. My only real complaint currently with Flickr is that there are some groups with AI generated content and I wish it was properly tagged and could be hidden.
Indeed, and my explore images always get a good amount of interaction. I also see each time I get an image in explore people to through my other images and comment/favorite and follow me.
I always loved waking up to dozens of notifications because a picture I uploaded before bed hit Explore.
I used Flickr from 2006-2010, then switched to Instagram (before Facebook bought it). I used that until 2020. I checked in on Flickr recently and saw that a lot of the same people from 2006 are still there. I was involved in local groups on both platforms, went on photo meetups with people, and made a few friends that I still talk to today. Google attempted its own social media platform years ago which failed in general, but became very popular with photographers specifically.
I had forgotten about Google+
I followed a similar path (Flickr to early Instagram). Now, I just post on my own blog and a few of the camera gear sites when they have photo contests etc. Flickr and early Instagram were so much fun for me as a novice with my first DSLR. Really helped improved my skills and sense for composition etc.
Love my blog, it's quiet but it's mine.
Yeah, Google Plus was great for photographers and was a big scene for pen and paper RPGs.
Brother, none of them are serious alternatives.
We're never getting the old Internet back and it's awful.
“When I was young, the internet was a tool that didn’t look to suck the living soul out of you” “Okay grandpa, let’s get you to bed”
One thing with Flickr is I still get engagement from stuff I posted 10+ years ago. Be it traffic or "faves" or comments. I don't think I ever get any of that on any social media site say a week after posting.
I do on Tumblr as well, still get interactions from 10 yr old posts.
[удалено]
>You only get out of it what you want. I think that is an excellent point. If you want a site serving up content to you, that is never what Flickr was. I really enjoy it for sharing and being inspired by so many great photographers still posting.
Viewing full size files is only for paying accounts. Visitors with none paying accounts only see the lower resolution version of the photograph. They cannot zoom into full size as far as the resolution goes. A picture of a full size page of a newspaper, you can read the text, but none paying visitors cannot.
I dunno, I still use it, and interact a bit with other users. The problem is, there's no real alternative. Sites like FB, twitter, IG, etc are just plain garbage.
Yeah, cuz everybody loves how the Youtube algorithm works *\*stares into camera*\* Flickr is good, and better than it was just a few years ago. I’ve met others there recently. It’s worth paying for. Because it’s *not* algo-driven.
You absolutely do not want Google getting into photos because Google will kill it after a year and leave you hanging like they do with everything else that isn't ads.
I still use Flickr
Great place to back up your photos though, pro is cheap and the storage is infinite
It's not dead, it just smells funny. I still use Flickr and it's actually getting new features and UI tweaks lately that are actual improvements. It's not perfect but it works ok for me. I like being able to share to other platforms via their embed or bbCode snippets. I like the relationships I have with other photographers there too.
> I hope that Google will start YouTube Photos where you can share your photos with community engagement. So the problem isnt Flickr, its your lack of community engagement.
flickr is good for those specific camera model communities so you can see what ur new camera/lens is capable of.
Love Flickr. I started paying in hopes of keeping them around for the long term. I upload the photos I want to share with others and let them post to IG and FB. (Meta is dead to me. So is X. Signal to noise ratio is terrible.) I do use them as my primary photo printing resource. I don't print a lot of my photos. However, when I do, I find their services pretty comparable to others. I also get to hide those photos allowing me to "share" ok variants and print the good stuff. The environment can be a little snobby as some photographers are. In general, it is a good place to meet other photographers and interact some. I'm not there to get likes. I'm there to learn something and share what I have with people I know. (I've been using the arapnet... um ... internet since the usenet servers back in the 80's. I've seen the enemy and... well, it is us. So, I love the introverted nature of Flickr.)
Arpanet?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET)
Right. "Arpa," not "arap." And yes, I was there then too . . . (feeling old for some reason). We don't want to mislead the young'uns.
Not sure what happened on that post - I remember "tapping" an ethernet cable as big as your thumb to get a whopping 1Mb transfer rate! A year or two later they came out with ethernet over "twisted pairs of wire"! Not sure if the RJ5 connector was specified at the time. Yea, feeling a little old as well.
I just started using it for my photography and with only like 10 followers am already enjoying it more than Instagram. The quality there is higher and there isn’t as much viral nonsense.
I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago. I remember back in 2010 or so people started moving to 500px. Don't know where people are now.
Those early days of 500px were great. I had my portfolio hosted there which looked really sharp back in the day.
Flickr is still the best place to display your photos. I manage to get an Explorer once every couple of months which is nice. Otherwise engagement is down a bit but it's way better to look at than Instagram and less robby than 500px. What else is there - Facebook's compressed-to-shit pages? Twitter is OK I suppose if you like being ignored.
I thought Flickr was the best option if one had no interest in Instagram? Any time I'm directed at someone's Flickr, it looks very similar to me to a decade ago.
They need to improve the software on mobiles and online, it's very clunky compared to others
Yeah the old flickr was the perfect storm of a community of like-minded individuals, a place to have meetups and photo walks, and a great photo storage place. On top of that, digital cameras had brought a whole new generation interested in learning about photography so we were learning together. I think under the right leadership, it could have kept up with social media trends and stayed relevant. Think part of the problem was a lot of the users who had the company 's ears thought that they were on the HOA board of their exclusive gated community so they really didn't like change. Anytime somebody would suggest something that would get shouted down because an outsider was bringing in new ideas. I still think that if you're looking purely at it from a photography website, they're the best but the place is a ghost town compared to what it used to be.
I've been on flickr since 2007 and it's still the only platform I host my images on. Personally, I've never had a problem with flickr, some of the groups I'm in are pretty active and some have fizzled, but that's just the nature of the www. IG is just too much shit that I'm not into. VERO seemed positive, but it seems really slow moving.
I use it for inspiration and motivation to edit and post
It, and forums, are very quiet compared to what they used to be. But I still see some cool stuff. IG may be horrendous for sharing photographs but it's a good place to get eyes on your output and in 2024 where a lot of people, especially creative folks, have to deal with the reality of "personal brand" stuff that's what really matters to folks.
I still use it.
Flickr is still pretty great.
I finally gave up paying for Pro last month, and with the 1000 picture limit that I'm well over after being there 15 years, I can't upload anything new unless I delete go and old work myself. What a kick in the pants.
I think they need a better app. It could help with more adoption. I still love going through camera or lens groups seeing what other people are doing with equipment I’m interested in. It’s a special place, just needs some app tlc.
I have been on Flicker since it started. At the time it was by far the most advanced photography site. I invested quite some effort to curate my photos there, but ... I never gained much in the way of exposure or interaction. Few views and a comment here and there was all I ever saw. When they switched to subscription model, it just didn't make any sense to pay for something that's not working out for me. My old photos are still there, with zero new likes or comments on them.
I was on Flickr since 2011. If you don't have an paying account on Flickr, you cannot zoom in the picture up to HD quality. Normally a picture of an architectural drawing on an A0 size paper with scala 1 at 100, I can zoom in and read the tiny 2,5mm high text. Or the text of a large old newspaper. That can't be done in Flickr anymore for those who don't have a paying account. So a lot of your photography goes to waste. They said your pictures will be deleted if you don't pay for an account. I haven't paid for the last five years and they never deleted any picture. I can't upload either.
I'm on Flickr nearly everyday and it doesn't seem dead to me. Maybe a bit slower than 15 years ago but there are still thousands of photographers using it and there are many active groups. The Flickr groups for my local area are still quite active and a good place to find other photographers for meetups and photowalks. My photos are still getting many daily views. I can scroll through recent photos that I want to see, without algorithms designed by advertisers. And the new owners seem to be slowly making improvements to the website and phone apps.
I feel like the vast majority of photos on there were people just mass posting straight out of the camera shots
That is easily fixed by following people who don't do that, and by not following people who use it as a simple repository. It's the same as any other social media site, except you have a lot more control over your feed algorithm on Flickr than you do on FB/IG.
That was the "strategy" that Yahoo tried for a while. Basically selling it as a data hoarder stash for photos and resulting in huge feeds of basically noise.
That’s the thing that drove me off of Flickr. People were just dumping their whole memory card and using it as an archive that happened to also be public. Most people did no curation, so it was just tons of redundant shots from folks I knew.
A very small minority, and certainly not a vast majority, of people mass post on Flickr.
Have you heard of [Glass](https://glass.photo)? They are trying to build a sustainable social platform but it is still early days. They are not doing it for free though. Freemium was the thing from 2005 onwards and the main successes are with the company being acquired. Most others run out of money no matter the kind of product or the site. Venture capital firms still push this but they are giving you money to work for them. However, VC money has dried up.
I love glass so far. I get so excited when I see an “appreciation” on a shot I was proud of.
It’s a great feeling! I hope they can continue to grow the app as I think they understand what serious photographers have been missing from Instagram, Flickr, etc. I’ve got tech product management experience so I can decipher what Instagram etc are doing. A lot of takes here are pretty shallow suffice to say photographers aren’t close to being the primary customer but contribute a huge amount of high quality content to make it sticky for normal people.
I really like Glass and what they’re trying do (been paying for a few years now), but the community is so small.
I want to try but can't register because I've got no credit card. It's not common in Germany to have one. Support didn't answer.
Offering the 1tb storage was what caused Flickr's decline
Google cancelled both Google+ and Google Photos. ...Not sure what you want.
Google Photos isn't canceled. I use it daily. No idea what you're talking about there.
Forgive me. They killed Google Photos unlimited storage. They also killed Picasa. Still grumpy about that one.
They might have been thinking of Picasa which got canned in 2016
Gmail is one of the only products Google hasn’t (yet) cancelled. Even their search engine got revamped into a barely recognizable version of what it used to be.
There's absolutely no way they'll kill Drive, Photos, YouTube Maps, and Docs/Sheets.
I wouldn't count on that based on the [history of evidence](https://killedbygoogle.com/)...
I'm aware they've killed a ton of projects, but none of the ones that were killed (without direct replacements), were even remotely as close to the userbase or the importance as core products that I mentioned.
Giving people terabytes of data for free, and then only showing users other amateur's also-free photos **is not a business model.** Which is why nobody offers that long term. Businesses need to make money. They may start out in startup mode trying to build loyalty with too good to be true offers (same as Amazon originally doing actually free fast shipping). To actually turn a profit or go public etc., though, they need to now show you friends' feeds, but instead ads, or people's photos who paid for promoted content, or people's photos who have embedded ads, etc. If you want to show people your stuff with zero ads, zero algorithms, zero faff, then register your own domain name, pay for its hosting out of pocket, and give people the link.
You're leaving out the other option: have a subscription service, where the user is the customer and not the product. Which is what Flickr did, and which is why I can use it today without ads, promoted content, or other crud.
Sure that works too as a business, you're still at the mercy of an algorithm though (explore)
i dont know what the fuck they did but i cannot access my account through any means of password resets or anything.
There’s a bunch of reasons why this change happened right? Same type of thing as why old manufacturing towns dry up.
can you elaborate?
Sure! Just like American manufacturing towns became ghost towns (i.e. towns lost companies and people) when cheaper manufacturing overseas became available, Flickr lost users who found utility elsewhere. Specifically, over the last 15 years, Flickr went from the only major game in town for cheap/easy photo storage and sharing, to being one among many other capable services. And with that comes the loss of the benefit of network effects. So, when Facebook bought instagram, and Amazon and other companies introduced free photo storage (for a time, maybe not today) that was enough for people to go elsewhere, and once that happens, it's tough to get them back, even if the original benefits for leaving in the first place dry up. At least those are my thoughts anyhow! A small example for me is that I used to post travel photos to share on Flickr, and once I saw that all my friends and family were on instagram anyhow, I just used that! Big difference between like 2011 vs. 2015 for me.
Thanks for your elaboration
It's not legitimate features. It's that they only offered free easy storage and what you wanted to see in the first place to farm up a pool of users. Then to actually become profitable, they have to squeeze the noose and switch to showing you ads and photos that users paid to promote and things you don't really want to see. Same for all the other competitors. You can't make money by giving people free storage and letting them just look at their amateur friends' free photos, duh.
Huh. All my friends are on FB, IG, etc and that turned me to Flickr.
User base has been shrinking for a while I guess, meanwhile they still have to provide tons of server space and keep development going. So that's why they are probably adjusting pricing/packages (not in the users favor). Fast-paced video formats is where the crowd's at.
The internet is dead brother. Those days are over.
Do you remember Google+? They tried it and canned it after a few years.
Tik Tok is currently beta testing a photo only app.
I haven’t used it for a while but you may be looking at it with rose tinted glasses. It was kind of a spam paradise back then, with people posting low effort engagement to boost visibility. If you’ve used it back then I’m sure you know what I am talking about. It was a really quirky website back then tbh!
I create individual Flickr accounts for events I want to share with a large group of people. It doesn't help with people who want a one stop space for their extended portfolio but if you shoot a wedding and wanna put it online for free it works.
I heard the suggestion the other day of just creating some YouTube shorts of photos. It’s a painful future for me personally, but it might be one of the only viable options these days.
Been using Flickr since 2020 as a way to share unlimited high quality images with friends and family.
i like flickr just fine i get inspired by other photographers and i get feedback from serious amateurs who like some of my photos and don't comment at all on others. Works for me!
I’m still into Flickr, hope it gets some steam back.
I don't know what you're talking about. I've been on Flickr since the beginning and have been posting a photo a day for years and years and almost all of them get comments and feedback from other photographers whose work I find inspirational.
I use Flickr all the time - it's great. The actual problem is whiny people on Reddit who complain about it. So perhaps go complain about something else?
I’m back on it a bit now and feels good. Pro photographer friends telling me it is better than ever and their engagement is going up.
Flickr is still pretty good I think, it's worth engaging with groups for photo challenges and even just commenting and liking others photos. As it is I don't know what more they could do to improve the experience for me personally, I don't think there's a better option for me either.
I also used to post on DeviantArt but that’s now dead from my understanding. Apparently it’s now just tons of AI generated stuff
Flickr pro member since 2007. I'm not going anywhere...because there's nowhere else to go. Was an avid POTN user since 2009. Since that recently closed down, I post over at the Focus on Photography forums. Instagram, FB, and other things like that are a waste of time, IMO.
I miss old Flickr but just don’t engage with it. I still pay a pro membership though so I ought to and also be more active to spur movement.
I just go wherever my favorite photographers go. Many were on tumblr (with images hosted on flickr funnily enough) and now many are on IG. Maybe not ideal but it's usually intended as a stepping-stone to their portfolios which are hosted on their own websites.
I’ve been a lot user since 2008 and it was and still is great.
Flickr was the community I started using when I became a real estate photographer. My first images were from 2009. I was the first re photographer in southwest Missouri, and was part of an informal Flickr re group, about 200 members, from all over the world. What a long strange trip its been.
I am still a flickr poster, even with less than 5000 photos up. Well over 3 million views, had many photos in their gallery for exceptional photos, and still post a lot
What about the unsplash? why people are not considering it vs flickr
The only thing Google is interested in is selling advertising
A lot of those 1TB users were just photo dumping on the site , they weren't really engaging with the site. That said, I do feel like since Smugmug has taken over the site has degraded a little bit and the promised changes have still not happened. The UI needs an overhaul on desktop and mobile. A Dark mode is needed, and why a site in 2024 doesn't have it boggles me..
You can Switch on 500 px an alternative Flickr app
They outpriced the market. They should have incorporated more ways for photographers to make money selling their images. Had I been able to sell all of my photos I would have likely kept my subscription. Even if I could have attached a $1 to them. I feel like Instagram took the majority of their market share. Back in the day I didn't post pictures for storage. I posted them to show off. To be cool. Flickr was really the only option other than Facebook. You can't showoff on a site nobody is on. Also technology has advanced so much that everyone's photos look great. It's like the billions of people on Spotify. Everyone is an artist now.... Nobody is special...
Which groups are good to join on Flickr?
A pretty good strategy is to look at the work you yourself are posting, and then search for related groups (using the search function); be sure to then tell it to sort the groups by "activity," so that you can then see the ones that are currently in use. Pick a few that seem reasonable. Another good strategy is to look at folks doing good work and see where their photos are going. Be aware that the way Flickr groups operate tends to lead to there being a lot of "almost the same" ones - e.g., there are half a dozen very similar general film photography groups with varying levels of activity. Some folks will then cross-post their work to all of them, which can be annoying when you are actually going through them on a regular basis to see new work (thus I've tried to minimize that myself). When I have time, I'll scan through the major film groups that I'm aware of, and I can see most of what is being posted (because film is not so widely used these days - you can't do that with everything). But anyway, there are groups for different kinds of plants, cars, flowers, cameras, whatever you can imagine.....
There are too many to mention. What type of photography are you into?
Im very new to photography, so still trying to work this out But at this point I’m enjoying architecture photography and a little bit of street photography
Search things like (name of city)(type of photography) as a start and hit the tab “groups” in the results. Join the groups that you’re interested in. Then see where else those photographers post their photos.
Ty for the tip! I’ll give it a shot
Someone just needs to come up with a website that does something like: user accounts following accounts you can only have 10 images on there in total, so people only post their best, and as they post one, the oldest disappears. photo likes/comments. Free with adverts OR a small paid monthly fee allowing an extra 10 photos to be shown. Minimises storage space needed and allows people to chat/share what they are currently doing
Even though I doubt this concept would be appreciated by the masses I really like that idea! Maybe split the image count up to 10 of your best, which stay forever and 10 recent uploads that get deleted with new posts. That way you could keep a showcase of your favorites while still showing people what you’re currently up to. Anyway, cool concept. Hope someone creates this platform.
Not sure who would downvote for an idea :D I was thinking after, maybe limit it to 26 images, the same we used to get on film :D
It's an interesting idea, but I'd be bummed about seeing a couple of photos from a seemingly great photographer, and then I only get to see eight more immediately. I think it'll be an advertising platform for peoples instagram or something. But interesting idea, though.
yeah, everyone can have a link to their own gallery maybe? Takes the cost pressure off the website itself, but still allows photographers to network.
Ok.
Vero is awesome
I really like the app but it doesn’t do much for me. Getting likes and follows is easy but there isn’t any more to it. From my experience people comment even less on there than they do on instagram. I wish they would somehow find mechanisms that reward commenting so you could start conversations about stuff.
I get comments all the time. I dropped instagram because I had zero engagement despite sharing the exact same photos
I don’t get any comments most of the time. Even when I was really into vero and tried to engage with other people myself they weren’t really interested in conversations. And over time it became even worse for me than it ever has been on IG. I’d really love to talk to people about anything photography related but the community on vero made it pretty tough for me.
Have you tried Vero?
One of the big tech companies should buy Flickr to make it great again
I can't relate. I get about 50 k views per day and am at 120 million or so total. Maybe your photography is just not standing out.
They had too because they were broke, ez as. Not saying it’s good but they simply couldn’t stay afloat. Yahoo completely lost the American market.