I'm as quick to dismiss re-skinning as any self-righteous dev, but this really hit the spot for Flickr. Flickr has always had a trove of useful photo archiving and categorizing features...sometimes I upload photos just because their geocoding editor is so convenient to use. Many of the other major photo services lack even simple group creation of photos (I.e. having a single photo endpoint both be in your "Family memories" and "Summer Vcation" albums)...and Flickr is by far the best in terms of making it easy to discover old, but significant photos.
This is not to say that this means Flickr will survive against Facebook, anymore than quality point and shoot pocket cameras have a chance of revival in our camera phone era. But Flickr, for now, definitely has the edge in quality and variety of photos. Even if you think Instagram filters are the best thing ever, the laws of physics (I.e. optics) limits the vast majority of their photos to a narrow range limit.
It's worth pointing out that Google Plus has had a better photo album design than Flickr for awhile now...I just tried them out (again) and saw that they, for the most part, have most of what makes Flickr useful. However, Gplus is decidedly focused on social sharing...it's hard to describe how this drastically impacts its use as a photo service...but using GPlus's photo feature was, for the first time in a long while, that I've just given up in frustration in the first five minutes. But this may be just a sign that I've finally hit old age.
Very true in comparison to Instagram. Flickr doesn't strip your metadata and color profiles. They allow uploading actual rectangle photos instead of square or square-ish. They don't compress the hell out of the images. They store an original of the upload (great for an archiving failure). There's also more community-building tools even if they're no where near the vibrancy of a decade ago (though the unlimited storage is probably what led to the decline as many folks just dumped everything on it).
The biggest beef is everything that comes with it needing to be for-profit and how you can't control the whims of the product owner.
I feel as though it is too little, too late. Flickr were in a fantastic position to dominate the online photo space (they did for quite a while) and then a little known app by the name of Instagram came along. Even the pros are using Instagram to showcase new photos, it has supplanted Flickr as the dominant online photo sharing platform.
That is not to say that people don't use it. Flickr is still quite popular, I use Instagram and Flickr to show off my photography (all of that space), but I think they need to start innovating and moving quickly again or risk neglecting their devote users for a third time.
Anyone else feel as though this new interface looks like the Google Plus Photos interface, like a scaringly close copy of it? Even the interface seems to act in similar ways to Google+
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.
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.
The sad thing about Flickr is that it's being killed by Facebook and their massive picture uploading. And the only way that's a superior service is in sharing with friends, it falls way short in every other way. I suppose the sharing aspect is just what consumers have decided to value most.
really? I post photographs on G+ entirely out of network effects - that's the site that my friends check reliably. Flickr is like a black hole, now, socially.
But the Flickr user experience is still nice compared to G+'s clunky too-much-javascript.
To be fair, I think of Facebook more as a good microblogging platform than photo sharing. Unless more has changed than I expected, Flickr will still suck for that.
Great news. Happy to become a paying Flickr customer again. There still isn’t a good place to store and share photos where it doesn’t feel like someone else owns them. Good integration with mobile and reasonably priced storage would be at the top of my list. And I agree with the overall tenor that then community is what made Flickr amazing. Happy to contribute to the efforts of bringing that back. Lots of challenges ahead, but this feels like a good thing for the internet.
Definitely. One of Flickr's biggest problems was it's lack of mobile support, and now, their iOS app is awesome, so I can only imagine good things from them.
Oh wow! I'm cautiously optimistic that Flickr can be brought back from the dead. I loved Flickr's platform to share my photos and find other photographers to follow and get inspiration from.
I just hope that however any of this falls out, Flickr survives and starts to see some attention. I really, really like Flickr (pay for it even) and don't want to see it die. I actively dislike the competitors in the social photo uploading space (cannot stand Picassa's UI, and Facebook is, well Facebook. Photos are not the primary function there). Flickr suits my needs just perfectly.
And I'll add that I'm excited by this. I have a lot of photos on Flickr, but fell off using it as Yahoo neglected it. I still don't feel like photos are a solved problem for me. Hopefully this will at least shake things up, but I'd love to see them turn again into my favorite tool for managing and sharing my photos.
Yep. Flickr does a lot of things right in comparison: holds onto and prominently displays camera metadata (EXIF), doesn't strip your color profile, allows uploading in wide gamuts to all clients (no sRGB conversion), doesn't compress the living hell out your photo, much more lenient on photo dimensions allowed to upload which is great for panoramas (not limited to square and squarish crops), allows editing not just the post data but also the license and the image itself after upload (maybe you realized it was darker than you thought and need to make a tweak), holds onto an original copy of the upload for archival reasons (I've used in a pinch when someone needed a hi-res copy and I wasn't attached to my NAS), and the, not to gatekeep, lack of everyday phone shots made the platform great to just browse by 'interestingness' and not being slapped with memes or influenerse or low-quality stuff for your friends but not a portfolio.
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 know that many photographers use it to share their works, and it's better than most other photo sharing sites out there. When Facebook got better with photo handling(more than 60 per album, tagging, and God help us, face recognition), I imagine a large number of people stopped using Flickr and just stuck with Facebook instead.
I think stagnation is definitely a big part of their problem-not many improvements in usability(or maybe I just haven't been paying attention). I also believe there was a story sometime in the last few months where Flickr mistakenly wiped out several people's albums and had no way to recover them. They lost major points for that.
That aside, I thought the author's post was pretty touching and I wish him the best.
This is not to say that this means Flickr will survive against Facebook, anymore than quality point and shoot pocket cameras have a chance of revival in our camera phone era. But Flickr, for now, definitely has the edge in quality and variety of photos. Even if you think Instagram filters are the best thing ever, the laws of physics (I.e. optics) limits the vast majority of their photos to a narrow range limit.
It's worth pointing out that Google Plus has had a better photo album design than Flickr for awhile now...I just tried them out (again) and saw that they, for the most part, have most of what makes Flickr useful. However, Gplus is decidedly focused on social sharing...it's hard to describe how this drastically impacts its use as a photo service...but using GPlus's photo feature was, for the first time in a long while, that I've just given up in frustration in the first five minutes. But this may be just a sign that I've finally hit old age.
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