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.
People might remember Flickr for its communities, but I remember it for being a great archive of public photos.
I have over 22,000 photos in my account — all of them privately shared with my family.
I'm a Pro user, however I only became a Pro thinking that if I stop paying, then the photos I uploaded will be safe from deletion. And I renewed my subscription right after SmugMug announced the acquisition, along with saying that they "don't have any plans to change free accounts". I guess that wasn't a reasonable expectation.
Unfortunately I might have to move off Flickr because it's not a safe storage for my photos. I guess that's the point of their upgrade, heh? They don't want archives, they want communities.
Except that for actually sharing photos with people, Facebook, Instagram, Google Photos are wildly more popular. Which makes Flickr just a forum with a slow interface.
---
I do understand the business reasons. If it keeps the lights on, then I guess it's better than the alternative.
But I'm also afraid that this will kill Flickr for good.
I don't know your use cases, but FWIW I've been really happy with SmugMug.
Browsing and discovering other people's photos is easier on Flickr, but SmugMug is miles ahead when it comes to hosting, printing, presenting, tracking, and organizing. Then again, I pay for it, so I'm sure that's part of it.
I would love if SmugMug kept their existing interface (which I'm sure they will because a lot of pro-photographers use it and want it the way it is), but also gave an option to show SmugMug photos on Flickr.
Stopped paying for pro a few years ago because of arrogance and hubris that was common in the web darlings of the last ten years. Couldn't get a simple customer service request answered without snark or condescension. Garbage redesigns of the layout and refusal to listen to feedback meant you were paying for storage and nothing more (pretensions about "community" notwithstanding).
On the other hand, my limited interactions with Smugmug have been stellar. I really like those guys and wish them luck.
The joy of Flickr was exploring the random pictures from ordinary people. I could care less about the heavily Photoshopped "prosumer" stuff that seems to be more popular on the platform. I liked seeing natural skill at composition instead of digital post-processing.
Unfortunately, it looks like SmugMug wants Flickr to be more like SmugMug, so I don't see myself buying back into pro.
Flickr to me was mostly about sharing my photos with friends and family before facebook killed that use case. I don't use facebook much any more, but no one else in my circle uses Flickr either.
Deleting photos over the limit is a bit annoying though. I seem to remember in the past they just made them temporarily inaccessible if you let Pro lapse for a bit (while travelling or whatever).
Time to whip up something that will compare what I have uploaded on flickr (4000+ photos over 12 years) to what's on my local backups so I can download what I have to and forget about the rest.
I'm a pretty big Flickr user, but out of all the online services I've used, it is one of the most un-innovative. Very little has changed since I signed up for Pro 2 years ago. Given Yahoo's other problems, this is only a sign for the worse.
I'm not sure if you're just stating a personal preference there, or hinting that Flickr are somehow morally superior to Google. But Flickr had their own 'google Photos moment' a few years back, when they were bought out by SmugMug and immediately got rid of their 'free for life' 1TB storage.
SmugMug lacks the social angle is that is important to some photographers (including myself). Self-promotion via Flickr is incredibly easy - their metrics on each of your uploads is incredibly useful also (for gauging general public interest in your work).
Flickr is less about your personal gallery - it's more about a universe of images, made easily discoverable, and easily shareable and discussable. SmugMug is definitely more of a "your hosted gallery" service, which is useful as a portfolio for photographers (and a sales point, via their tightly integrated print sales), but is really not comparable to Flickr as a social and promotional tool. I really enjoy exploring and looking at the work of superior photographers and learning from that - losing Flickr would be a huge blow to the photography community. SmugMug is not nearly so discoverable.
Yahoo certainly largely neglected it for a long time though I still use it myself and know other relatively serious photographers who do as well.
I'm actually a bit of two minds about comparing Flickr with social media sites like Instagram. Certainly, casual photo sharing is far more popular on those sites. On the other hand, I'd have to be convinced that a single site can really function as SmugMug or Flickr do for people who self-identify as prosumers while at the same time also being the preferred site for the typical Instagram user.
I have so many mixed feelings about this. I've always been a big Flickr fan. I absolutely loved the Explore section.
It had a set of really nice photos that I would spend every evening after working, browsing, sipping on a cup of tea and listening to music. I find some fun groups, some people who click some great photos on some really impressive gear which I don't own, but I would love to. The quality of Explore dropped drastically, sometimes showing up weird, creepy things, or something just random photos. It didn’t seem curated at all.
Fast-forward to recent times, I've seen Flickr bought and sold, schemes changed and more. There have been times of instability on the site, the Yahoo! login has been a pain. Performance has been erratic as a whole.
At a time where Instagram, Google Photos (and other cunning) services are the only healthy (in terms of users), ‘social’ photo hosting services, Flickr to my naive mind stands out so I don't want to see it go away. I started paying for a Flickr Pro to support it, even backed up my entire photo base to it. Now, I’m not sure if I need find alternatives
I feel the e-mail sounds more personal, than the usual two-faced PR spiel we see from larger corporations. It's nice that Smugmug appears to have good intentions, but it hasn't treated Flickr too well either. Logins have been broken in the recent past, there have been several outages, terrible migration attempts that almost speak of incompetence. Of late, it says I can't login using Firefox. Once logged in (after setting a different User Agent), it works perfectly fine.
It's a bad direction for average users (not average professional photographer but average users).
Their mobile app has a sync process and touts it as a way to backup your photos. Synced photos are automatically marked as private and has NO impact on your desire of quality over quantity.
Flickr has offered free 1TB for a long time. Archival of mobile photos is the intended feature and you are shaming users for using it?
If they want to wall off average Joe from the pros, fine. It's their right. But they should not delete old photos. Storage is cheap. There's going to be lots of unhappy people when they log in a few years from now to find photos of some deceased family and realize SmugMug deleted them.
When SmugMug acquired Flickr my only comment on the article was in regards to the free 1TB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16888876) as I was afraid it works be on the chopping block. But I never imagined they would be as 'smug' as to delete old photos.
I will likely download the photos and stick them in Amazon Glacier or something.
As far as the rest of the users who are not tech savvy, best of luck to them.
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.
I'm down right angry. I loved the old flickr interface. It was simple and usable. Now it looks like a less functional google+. Flickr's job is NOT to be a fancy photo viewer, it's supposed to be a photo organizer.
Looks like yahoo just screwed up the last good thing they had. This will be my last year with this service (I've been a member since 2004 and have had a pro account for several years now).
Facebook killed Flickr for casual users by proving that the context and network around your photos is what matters. Nobody takes photos to put them onto Flickr in isolation, they want to share them (Facebook is the new "family gathers around the photo album").
Instagram has taken over on a newer vertical: it's Twitter for photos (driven by what's happening around me right now, off-hand).
That leaves Flickr to scrounge over the pro and prosumer photographers. Are there enough pro/prosumer level photographers to really make a compelling case for Flickr? Maybe. But probably not at the scale its founders hoped when they set it up. They had the opportunity to create a place for every digital photograph ever taken to go. They've instead been beaten out of areas they were leading.
If you want to backup your photos online there are better solutions. If you want to share photos with friends, there are better solutions. I'm guessing that there are probably technically superior solutions for pro/prosumers, too. I've been saying for a while that Flickr's cards are marked, I don't think Marissa Mayer will put any significant weight behind it and if I were a Yahoo! shareholder I wouldn't want her to.
How do they use it? Does it have a good programmatic access? Because UX-side, I'm surprised they still exist. I don't know of a single photo-related web site that has worse UI and is more annoying to use than Flickr.
Flickr isn't about casual users, but for a while it was bloated by casual users which made it look like a site with really big potential.
"I want to make the photo storage/sharing site for all people who take photos" is a bigger proposition (and potentially more lucrative) than "I want to make the photo storage/sharing site for all pro/prosumer photographers".
For a while people were judging Flickr by the fact that it had users from both camps. Then the consumers left and Flickr looked anaemic.
The price is annoyance but not hurting me.. what is hurting me usability, both Flickr and Smugmug can do better to serve me. If anything fix flickr’s Social experience and Smugmugs upload and stats reporting, as a basic paid tier I have no insights if my url only sharing pics are widely used or not, seems like a cheap tax to force me to upgrade just to see the number of views
The whole photo-sharing space is ripe for a massive disruptor.
Photographers and enthusiasts have been drifting away from Flickr for ages, but up until now there's been no offering that's really a suitable full replacement.
On the one side you have sites like SmugMug, which has an awesome API, detailed controls over your images... but is devoid of any of the social features Flickr users have grown to love (and loathe sometimes - YOUR PHOTO HAS BEEN INVITED TO [INANE GROUP HERE!]).
Or you have beautifully designed sites like 500px... which also has no API and forces its users to operate the whole thing painfully in manual. But it does have really good discoverability features, maybe better than Flickr.
I'm not confident that Facebook and Google+ will take over the photography enthusiasts' world. I believe that most regular people will share their pictures there (and they already do, on Facebook), but the photography community won't jump on board until there are some very significant leaps (solid API, discoverability features, more niche-specific social features).
But in any case, Flickr is feeling old and creaky, we're all just waiting for something better to come along. Honestly, I'm surprised it's taken this long.
I'm a photographer, and I was a HEAVY user (and paying customer) of Picasaweb when it existed, from the day it was launched.
When they pushed everything into G+ it enraged me. They took away the nice, fast, minimal, grid-view albums and gave us a heavy social-network wrapped mess. They turned a powerful Flickr competitor into a "pretty" and feature-poor share-with-your-friends site.
It was embarassing to link to albums to my clients because it was basically me linking to a Facebook-style social network rather than a photo site. Throw in the "realname" bullshit so I couldn't use an alias for my photography, and blam... instant enraged ex-customer running CLI scripts to systematically wipe my 10 years of Picasaweb usage (you can't bulk delete on Picasaweb).
I was upset when they killed Reader, but I got over it. I was upset when they forced G+ onto YouTube, but I got over it (I just don't log in for YouTube now). I never got over them destroying the only semi-decent Flickr competitor that exists, all in the name of "OMGSOCIAL". I was a huge Google fanboy who now goes out of my way to avoid anything/everything they do, thanks to their G+ push.
I've since moved on to being not-so-happy Flickr user (the lesser of evils currently, for bulk photo hosting and album management).
For what it's worth, with people saying there's too many photo hosting sites... I still can't find ANY that are as good as Picasaweb or old-Flickr were. Easy bulk management of photos/albums and their metadata like tags/titles/descriptions/locations. Albums within albums. A SIMPLE UI that is friendly to non-tech-savvy clients/friends visiting. Minimal fluff. Lightroom integration. Etc etc.
So far I'm liking Flickr better, though I've only dipped my toe in. Uploads (on the site, see [0]) are fast, organizing is fast (though the batch organize is weird IMO), everything can be made private by default easily, and ONE TERABYTE OF STORAGE. It's also much better for browsing than Picasa Web Albums, which are functional but don't really do it well. Flickr makes browsing quite pretty (in a good way, mostly) and generally better for showing your photos to someone.
Picasa the website is fine, and does just about everything right, though generally not in the most ideal way. Privacy controls are rich and you can still link directly to a photo to bypass (and revoke existing links). Albums are functional, face tags are functional (though now they use G+ accounts if you link to contacts... not happy, but I guess it works), comments are a bit hidden but work. I have several gigabytes in it (and bought more), no problems, no complaints. Main downside is it has definitely not been updated along with the rest of Google's properties, and it integrates very poorly for the most part (notifications, accounts, weird partial G+ linkage...).
Picasa the application is... different, but decent. It's surprisingly good in a number of ways, and I'd recommend it over iPhoto if only because iPhoto has routinely lost my data during updates, and slows to a crawl after several thousand photos. Picasa stays fast, searches quickly, organizes oddly but effectively. It leaves your photos in folders that (basically) match the UI, which may or may not be a good thing for you.
Picasa the application when synced to your Google account is slick 95% of the time (it all works as you'd expect), and a total hell-hole of duplication, sync failing, and filename mangling the remaining 5% (though most of that only rears its head when you hook it up for the first time). The 'Sync to web' on/off switch for each album is handy when it works, but hasn't generally handled turning on dozens at once.
I would honestly recommend against the syncing aspect of it, though sadly it's a major selling point. If you can hook it up once and leave it that way you probably won't have much trouble, but I did a lot of reconnecting, and it definitely got confused sometimes.
I'm a 3-year-Pro user of Flickr...my first thought upon Mayer's new job was: "YES, my Flickr photos are safe"
But Google didn't do a lot of innovation in this space and maybe Flickr will be seen as a distraction to whatever Yahoo's new mission will be? Wouldn't be surprised to see it spun off. It has a large community but is way behind Instagram and Facebook in terms of becoming synonymous with photo-sharing.
And yes, the main problem is that the site has stagnated. In recent months, new features have been added...but not enough to make the site more share-friendly or visually attractive. I resort to using various IOS apps to manage my photos.
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.
reply