Flickr: The first and last great photo platform
petapixel.com106 points by Nrbelex 3 days ago
106 points by Nrbelex 3 days ago
Flickr was the coolest thing Yahoo had when I worked there (Brickhouse was a close second).
I really loved all the places where they snuck in "Game Never Ending" in the product, because they didn't set out to make a photo sharing product, but steered hard into that.
Flickr was the only property which was allowed their own version of PHP and despite having PHP inside, every single URL said ".gne" (Game Never Ending). I worked for the PHP team and that was my only excuse to show up to work in the SF office instead of being stuck in Sunnyvale when visiting the US.
They had all the right bits of architecture built out - rest of Yahoo had great code (like vespa or the graph behind Yahoo 360), but everything was more complex than it should be.
Flickr had the simplest possible approach that worked and they tried it before building anything more complex - the image urls, the resize queues, the way albums were stored, machine-tags, gps co-ordinates.
I also took a lot of photos to put up on flickr, trying to get featured on the explore page up front - it was like getting published in a magazine.
Every presentation I made had CC images backed by flickr, it was a true commons to share and take.
And then Instagram happened.
+1 on Flickr being the best acquisition and product Yahoo! had.
I still have my account and old photos there. And because I licensed most of them as CC, a couple of them landed on Wikipedia because of that - felt nice.
This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme.
I was there pretty early. I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr that my Pro account upload quota was upgraded to 2GB monthly.
Made many friends via my photos, online and in-real-life. Many of my photos became pretty popular and picked (stolen a lot too) up by major newspapers/publications in India, USA, and even in Vietnam. Some even bought the original copy and rights. It was never my intention to sell my photos nor will that ever be but my guestimate is that I sold quite a lot (high single digit thousands of dollars).
I donated and gifted a lot of Pro accounts to people who asked, mostly students and thos who commented nicely on my blog. Many of my payments comes to Paypal and it got accumulated and there were no ways to get the money to India (for a very long time). So, I just used it to gift to others.
Before I stopped using it more than a decade ago. It had garnered over 10+ million views and my tenure with Flickr lasted almost a decade.
I’ve taken backups/takeout but do not have the heart to delete my account yet. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/
I signed up in 2004. It was part of a wave of hot new platforms, all of which it seems Yahoo! was acquiring (except YouTube, which went to Google). We used it at work as well (political consultancy) to host photos for applications, making great use of their excellent API. The idea of getting your photos back out again via a sane API with multiple sizes including thumbnails handled for you was pretty wild.
Yes, API was the other best thing about Flickr. A friend made his fortune, especially during the exodus days of Flickr. He traveled around the world photographing some of the best pictures I have seen in my life. He retired pretty early in the Himalayas (he is originally from there).
He made Bulkr, which was one of those tools that just works and super easy to use, in getting all of your photos offline from Flickr. I don't think it works anymore. His revenue and hits went crazy after Veronica Belmont talked about it.
https://brajeshwar.com/2011/bulkr-access-and-backup-your-fli...
I was a Flickr member for many years. It was the only photo sharing website that emphasized the art of photography and also felt like a real community where I actually made connections with and discovered like minded photographers. The focus was on the photography and it didn't play games to keep me locked into the platform (cough Instagram)
Nowadays, I have a locally hosted Immich instance. It's great as personal photo archive, but is missing the social features.
To be honest, with the advent of GenAI, I'm now reluctant to share my photos publicly because I don't like the feeling that my work will be slurped up for AI model training..
> I'm now reluctant to share my photos publicly because I don't like the feeling that my work will be slurped up for AI model training..
I cannot understand this mindset. People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages.
No they haven’t. Copyright protected you against your work being used in ways you did not agree to.
Enforcement is another things but photographers and artists have had ways to push back against illicit use of their work, notably by larger corporations. Licensing is an industry based on this protection alone.
The difference is that now, large corporations with plenty of money are able to just swallow other people’s work and pretend it’s “fair use” and derivative enough that they wash their hand of the fact that their models, that they charge lots of money for, would not be able to output anything they were not trained on. At least you could argue that a large image model would have a hard time creating a picture of a cat if it hadn’t been fed pictures of cats that belonged to other people than the company producing the model.
I don’t know if training on the world’s data without compensation is fair or not. There are valid arguments both ways, but as an individual, it should still be your choice whether you want to allow your work to be used in ways you do not agree with.
I think people at large expect at least recognition, and if possible, compensation, for their creations.
When a consumption system is built around providing neither, I don’t think we should be surprised that people feel slighted.
> Copyright protected you against your work being used in ways you did not agree to.
Is this true? Remember that Harlan Ellison plagiarism case, the nightmare he went through to get a payout? It seems the vast majority of times, when a corporation decides it wants to use something you created, it gets to just do so because it has more capital than you.
I agree. Back in the day hackers were for the free enablement and usage of all data, code and media included. Now it seems everyone has turned into copyright hawks which ironically only entrench big players via regulatory capture so say goodbye to actual open source AI models, they're too poor to license content while big tech companies can.
> People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages.
People, yes. The possibility of one person using a copyrighted work that I uploaded to the internet is very different in scope to that of a corporation with billions of dollars in funding using the same work to generate a product that automates the creation of similar such works.
> I cannot understand this mindset. People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages.
Right? On the one hand there was the mystery of what might happen with your photos and on the other there is the plain, inescapable knowledge that they will be donated to like four dude’s tech companies to make money off of without acknowledgement or compensation. That’s basically the same thing
i guess people who don't create anything can't understand how this feels, the day you check one of those massive image dataset they train on and see all your images... horrible feeling
How hard is it to understand "I want to share what Ive done, but I dont want predatory companies taking my work, profiting on it, and offering absolutely nothing in return."
Do you think that if you write a book directly inspired by another you should be required to pay the author of the book that inspired you?
You cannot understand the fact that people don’t work their work stolen by corporations to train their very-much-for-profit bullshit generators… I mean, AI models?
Please.
> bullshit generators
Do you call operating systems "malware enablers"?
i don't understand you want us to be happy that they take our work? so that their machine can reproduce it?
same once i seen my images in the massive data sets, i quit posting my photographs online and just share between friends and family now
At the peak of its popularity, Flickr was an interesting glimpse of the coming age of algorithmic homogeneity. In the mid-2010s, most of their top photos looked basically the same: heavily shopped, oversaturated HDR landscapes.
I stopped using Flickr around the time they started flirting with bait-and-switch strategies - "we'll hide / delete your old photos unless you pay" - so maybe things have gotten better... although I see that artificially-looking landscapes still dominate their "trending" page (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags).
Anyway, my general takeaway is that things are more interesting on photo sites where engagement isn't driven primarily by a global popularity ranking. You just come across thought-provoking work more often.
A company bought them so that they weren’t shutdown from revenue loss, and then instituted a policy of “pay for what you like” to resolve uncontrollable storage costs. Sounds like every other “free at first” cloud provider, and one should reasonably expect the same from any “freemium unlimited” present-day or future provider as well. I’m not faulting you for taking offense at it, but that’s not bait and switch, that’s bog standard normal business, and why I’ll never again post my photos to a free site. If they aren’t charging me now, they’re going to piss me off someday when they either do charge me or spontaneously collapse before ArchiveTeam gets ahold of them.
> At the peak of its popularity, Flickr was an interesting glimpse of the coming age of algorithmic homogeneity. In the mid-2010s, most of their top photos looked basically the same: heavily shopped, oversaturated HDR landscapes.
I agree with that. And then I moved to 500px, and it was the same. Started off promising, became very homogenous. Landscapes like you say, and the People sections were heavy with Eastern European semi-soft focus nudes in nature.
I still pay for Flickr Pro, for a couple of reasons: the API still works, and I basically use it as a DAM for my wife's website. She's a composer, and it's super handy to have her upload into a Flickr Album and pull back different image sizes for her catalog.
Secondly, it makes use of and exposes EXIF data. I really, really lament the Instagrammification of online photography, where the only aspect ration was 1:1, terrible resolution, no EXIF data, and certainly no easy way to link a photo to anything outside of Instagram. That EXIF data makes it so much easier to search photos - although it could do with some AI autotagging. Surely that's coming down the pike...
Lastly, it's like an internet time capsule. There are accounts that started in the early 2000s and haven't been touched since the 2010s, and you can still pull full resolution imagery from there. And there are people even more old fashioned (and probably even more old) than me, still uploading new photos and old slides.
It sucks that Yahoo didn't do anything with Instagram, but I'm glad it also managed to avoid completely destroying it.
Flickr has been mentioned in interviews by the founders of both Vimeo and YouTube as having been a direct inspiration on the creation of both of those sites. It got a lot of the design right the first time. Flickr and the projects that emerged out of the context it pioneered changed the world.
Hey, owner & CEO here. Reading this now, but AMA.
Just finished reading. Glad they captured what we're doing - photography & community - and what we're not - algorithmic feeds & privacy violations.
We have lots of work to do, and I think most of the criticisms are fair and on our road map. Small team, working hard, listening to customers. Like we've been doing for 24 years. (We're bootstrapped and privately owned, never taken VC).
AMA.
Author here. Glad this made its way to you. I've been chatting with Shay and don't have a ton of questions, but I'd just emphasize that even as Flickr continues to (rightfully!) modernize, please (a) don't drop the features that make it different than the closed social media platforms (e.g., RSS, open APIs, etc.) and (b) maintain and enhance the power features that make Flickr more than just a place to dump photos (e.g., would love to see a camera AND lens combination finder, search by EXIF, enhancements to the world map, etc.). Very much looking forward to more modern file types.
And while I think the site strikes the balance decently at the moment, Pro is too expensive for ads to get more intrusive (for the Pro user and for others looking at his/her photos).
But as I hope was clear, I'm a big supporter and would love to see the platform continue to thrive. If you're ever looking to bounce thoughts off a user, or anything else, I'm happy to help!
I think I asked Nathan B all of my important Flickr-post-your-aquistion questions at a 7CTOs event way back in 2019, but that was a lifetime ago. Do you make enough money off my Flickr Pro subscription to keep it going indefinitely? I'd rather pay you then funnel more cash to AWS or Google for cloud backups, but I'm not a professional photographer, so the actual SmugMug products aren't valuable for me and there's always the slight dread that you kill Flickr because it's a blip of a side hustle to the main business.
Yes. Flickr was losing a ton of money (>$50M/year) when we bought it, and it's now cash flow positive and profitable. Not by a lot, alas, but the difference between $1 and $0 or less is the difference between life and death. Flickr is alive!
As I think the article captured pretty well, we could make a lot more money if we went the algorithmic-privacy-violating route, but we don't want to. So we aren't.
Since we never raised a round of funding, as long as the bills are getting paid, we can do what we want - build a company for the long-term based on a great photography community. So that's what we're doing. :)
Hey, it's Saturday night and I'm on Hacker News woot woot.
I work on climate technology (sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky), and I have a side quest to create a "Freedom to Breathe" mural in Manhattan before the upcoming New York Climate Week. Might be up your alley knowing artists and photographers. How interested are you in working together on making a mural?
Lately I've been enjoying photography a lot but Flickr never clicked for me. Instagram nowadays is almost unusable for this as it prioritizes reels too much and 500px... I liked that one more than Flickr.
Right now, I'm using glass.photo and I actually quite like it. You have to pay, though, which is a high entrance barrier, but I feel the quality of what I see in the site is great, the platform works nicely and the community has been welcoming so far.
I yearn for a good site to share and comment photos which is a bit more open, though.
There's also Irys (from Alan Schaller). It's more open than Glass, as it's a freemium model, but it's also more closed at the same time, as it doesn't offer a web-based version. It's probably even more photographer-oriented than Glass. For something truly open, there's Pixelfed. All those platforms have their pros and cons, especially regarding the audience. Personally, I publish all my photos on my own website and syndicate them to (in order of preference): Glass, Pixelfed, Instagram, Irys.
I've tried Irys as well but the mobile only is kind of a deal breaker for me — I like seeing images in the big monitor to appreciate them more.
Of course I also have my webpage to showcase my favourite pictures but I feel I'm more picky in that site than in, say, Glass and instagram, since I want to show 'the best' there :-)
>it doesn't offer a web-based version
>It's probably even more photographer-oriented
not even remotely serious? ridiculous
It's very single purpose, but there's Furtrack for fursuit photography. One of the few sites that leaves photos in full quality rather than compressing them down to 1-2 megapixels.
It's been such a tragedy that we now have such good quality cameras, yet all the media we consume is incredibly downscaled and compressed to save money.
I've been a pro member for many years, with about 35k photos uploaded. I am grateful that they have never chased the engagement bait. Some people like to complain about the Pro features but I found them to be absolutely fair and I wanna do everything I can to support this platform.
All of my photos are automatically synced to Flickr via the Auto uploader, and getting things from my camera to Flickr is as simple as transferring the data from the dslr to my phone, and the auto uploader takes care of the rest.
From there I can go through the photos, decide which ones I wanna make public, and organize them into my albums to share with others.
My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
Can you elaborate on the markdown embed request? In which contexts would you want that?
I think I like about Flickr is the add a note feature. Not sure if other platforms has any similar feature but I find it helpful for me to add note on part on the photo for future reference such as place or anything peculiar.
Great?
I remember that time I reported someone for reposting my images.
Flickr's response was deleting my profile, all of my photos, and not responding to any of my attempts to contact them.
On the upside, it was a good lesson to not trust service providers.
SmugMug is pretty great.
Yeah, they should buy Flickr and abandon the whole social media aspect and just turn it into an exact copy of SmugMug, but interleave the pricing tiers.
It would really be crazy if they did that, but they claimed that limiting the number of photos users could upload, instead of limiting the quality, somehow made it more like a social media platform.
Which is basically a "pro-ish-plus" version of Flickr from the same owners as far as I know. I've been a Pro user of Flickr for a long time but probably hard to justify at this point which probably means that it's even harder to justify for the average consumer. Interviewewed them back in the day when they were a prominent AWS customer.
What, no shade on photobucket?
Single handedly created a lot of issues for anyone maintaining old cars…
oh man, I haven't heard of photobucket in years! A great place for those nostalgics of the old web, especially if you used forums. Photobucket was THE srvice to upload images to post on forums, including the "famous" signatures, gifs, etc.
This is less a pro-Flickr than an anti-Insta but I absolutely refuse to sign up for the latter
Zuck purely bought it to murder competition in the crib
I'm not going to sign up for it just because he put a hard login wall ("look at how many users we have!")
He kills art, he kills organic reach, all his products turn into spam, 97 ads per real post
> Zuck purely bought it to murder competition in the crib
That makes no sense. It’s very obviously been nurtured and grown by orders of magnitude since acquisition.
They introduced a limit to 1000 photos, I deleted almost everything, then somehow they didn’t go through with the limitation, only warning me about nearing 1000 photos. Anyone knows what exactly happened?
No mention of Picasa?
To me, Flickr is the better Photo.net. Photo.net has been around since 1993 and apparently is still running, but it never was a site where you could just collect your own work and share them the way you wanted. It would be interesting to read about how Flickr succeeded against an older, established competitor.
photo.net is the water cooler. flickr is the portfolio. They're different. I never talked to anyone on flickr. I'm still friends with people from photo.net
Flickr wasn't the first, and it sure wasn't great. It was just popular. The MySpace of image hosting would be apt, down to how awful using the website was.
It was atrocious.
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