
Flickr is shutting down Marketplace, its commercial photo licensing program - nadezhda18
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/21/flickr-is-shutting-down-marketplace-its-commercial-photo-licensing-program/
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bonaldi
Yahoo holds a lot of the blame for the death of Flickr, but it would have been
in trouble anyway. Flickr was born for a time when a photograph was a rarer
thing, and was something you'd put a lot of effort into both creating and
curating.

With smartphones, we are all now firehoses of photography, barely clinging on
by adding hearts and likes as the images fly past. Carefully adding metadata
and curating Flickr-style would be a full-time job for most of us these days.

I guess the closest modern analogue to what Flickr was is Instagram — which is
more carefully curated and selective – but Instagram has never cared about
quality, and a Flickr that chased the Instagram audience wouldn't really have
been Flickr anymore anyway.

~~~
swalsh
I disagree with this wholeheartedly. Pictures I take with my phone are "in the
moment" pictures something like "oh look my son put his pants on his head,
that's a keeper". Those I throw on facebook so my mom can check it out... and
then i'm done.

But when I pull out my $1500 DSLR, it's not a firehose (well it is, but not
what i'm going to publish) I'm going to go through hundreds of pics, pick 20
or so that matter, and then put effort into touching them up... because I shot
in RAW just so I could do that.

After you spent literally hours making that photo "just right", that's what I
use flikr for. It's also nice to have other photographers find your stuff, and
comment on how nice it is.

I think this is just one more point of "if you want to do a startup, look for
something owned by Yahoo, and build that"

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bonaldi
I don't disagree with you; it's just that those of us with the DSLRs (and the
ILCs) are the last holdouts, we're a niche rump of what used to be a
mainstream activity. Someone will make a nice life out of creating a service
for that niche, but it's not going to be a Yahoo-scale thing.

~~~
soundwave106
I would say that's more because Yahoo lacks any real good vision. :)

From what I see (based on this chart -- [http://petapixel.com/2015/04/09/this-
is-what-the-history-of-...](http://petapixel.com/2015/04/09/this-is-what-the-
history-of-camera-sales-looks-like-with-smartphones-included/)) -- DSLRs and
ILCs are "slow but steady" and not crashing too badly. A "niche" for sure. But
until smartphones can match the quality of a DSLR in certain situations (low
light or zoom for a start) I can see there always being a market for these
higher-end amateur / hobbyist type photographers. The category being
slaughtered now by smartphones is (obviously) the compact digital.

Flickr's not going to be able to compete at this point with the general social
media photography. Why not focus on a market they once had a good handle on
and probably isn't going away anytime soon?

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1024core
Yet another half-assed job by Yahoo. The way I saw it, there was potential in
becoming a realtime marketplace for photos of events. With the right
interface, you could let a user who happens to capture a newsworthy event to
sell his/her photos for good $$, and Yahoo collects a nice chunk of it.

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heyts
I would go and say that when flickr will be gone we will enter a different era
of the web. Flickr has been such a great influence over the years that
internet without flickr will be a different internet altogether

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product50
I find it difficult to relate to you. I have been an active internet user
since 1997 and have never used flickr a lot and don't feel I will miss
anything if it goes away. Also, if Flickr is such a seminal piece of property,
its usage would have been through the roof which is clearly not the case. Yes
- it was popular during its heydays but now it is just another photo
storing/sharing app.

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nakedrobot2
Flickr was the first "web 2.0" site. It was the first social network. It was
the first really global photo publishing website. So I agree with heyts above.
Flickr repeatedly becomes a shadow of its former self, and that is really very
sad. It could have been more, but Yahoo just drove it into the ground - they
did it slowly enough however that it did remain relevant for a long time, but
it missed just about every boat that came along.

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gaius
_It was the first social network._

Friendster pre-dated it by 2-3 years, MySpace and Facebook by a year.

I have to agree with product50, I am an avid photographer but Flickr was never
compelling for me. I would only ever see it when someone would post a link to
Facebook...

~~~
lightedman
"Friendster pre-dated it by 2-3 years, MySpace and Facebook by a year."

The BBS predates all of them.

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austinjp
Tangential....

Can anyone recommend a FOSS photo store built on top of AWS or similar cloud
hosting/storage?

I'm aware there are a thousand PHP photo library website-in-a-box type
solutions. I'm more looking for something that can take advantage of cloud
storage such as Amazon's buckets, so the billing increments with the amount of
data stored. In an ideal world it would retain max-res files in Glacier,
select storage intelligently based on frequency of access, etc etc.

It's for personal use. I'd like to pop something up for our family to archive
and share photos. Privately, with the option of publicly sharing.

~~~
dharma1
You'll probably want auto-sync from your laptop/phone/etc too.

I think Nextcloud on a VPS or your own server could work? It supports external
storage too (S3 etc). Though it's not just for photos.

[https://github.com/nextcloud](https://github.com/nextcloud)

I'm not sure if they do RAW previews, but should be possible to add.

Koken looks OK too, more photo oriented - [http://koken.me/](http://koken.me/)

~~~
prplhaz4
The nextcloud/owncloud debacle seems to need a little more time before sinking
too much into it.

We are currently using google drive to sync our photo library w/the home
server, and share out private links via email when needed. This keeps us from
having to maintain an app/server, users/pws for friends and family...etc, and
we can take down the private links as needed.

Not great, but workable at this point.

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kumarm
Flickr Has a Market Place?

I Bought License for Photos from at least 25 different Photographer by
emailing them (on Flickr Mail). Never knew there was Market Place :)

~~~
nadezhda18
yeah, and it is still marked as NEW in their photo search IU :-|

They want about $280USD per picture of 300dpi, which is waaaaaaaaay
overpriced. On Shutterstock, you can get 2 images for $29 with the most
expensive plan.

No wonder they failed.

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swalsh
I'm growing weary of trusting the cloud for some things. There are a few
photos I actually care about, and right now they're on Flikr. Facebook mangles
them, and flikr holds them hostage if I stop paying. I used to keep a local
copy, but over the years I've been lazy with copying it as I move machines.

I'm thinking of buying a raspberry pie, and a few extra large SD cards, and
just hosting it on the web myself.

I'll miss the social aspects though. It was fun to have the occasional email
pop up every now and then from someone commenting on a photo I took 3 years
ago.

~~~
sosuke
HDD space is cheap, combine a big one of those with a service like CrashPlan.
Even if you do a self hosted solution you want to make sure things are backed
up.

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cyberferret
The article didn't really clarify the actual reason for me. They cited
difficulties against competitive platforms, but is it because (a) their
technology wasn't as good as their competitors (b) their compensation
plans/margins weren't as good as their competitors, or (c) there really wasn't
interest from the photographic company for such a service, and there weren't
enough users to keep it viable?

~~~
MatekCopatek
IMHO they don't have a clear enough focus.

In terms of being a cloud service for photo storage, they can't compete with
Google Photos, iCloud and other mobile services that have the benefit of being
more deeply integrated and available as a default on their respective
platforms.

The social network aspect is obliterated by Instagram, Snapchat and the like.

The photo reselling part I'm not familiar with, but it seems to be lacking in
a similar fashion.

In short - their high point was the time when they primarily catered to
photographers. All three aspects of the service were useful for that crowd and
perhaps if they kept that position and developed advanced features that appeal
to that particular crowd, they could have remained strong. But once they
started reaching out to the general public, they alienated their original
audience and at the same time failed to compete with (originally) smaller
services that provided a better experience in each specific field.

That's the way I see it.

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ultramancool
The question is not what Yahoo is killing but what they aren't killing. I'll
be surprised if anything is left of Flickr in a few years given the success of
competition.

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dredmorbius
In terms of what might replace Flickr for image-based content, I've been
watching (and using) Ello for the past couple of years. The site isn't
entirely oriented around galleries of photographs, but _does_ feature
graphical content heavily (some fellow writers have griped a bit about this,
though I feel only with modest justification).

One interesting feature added in the past few months was a "Buy" button -- a
large green dollar sign -- which guides viewers to where they can buy a given
user's works. Mostly this seems to link to other services, blogs, Amazon,
Etsy, eBay, or related pages, but tying this in more tightly or providing a
Flickr-type capability might be something Ello could look at.

I suspect they're familiar with Flickr's offerings, but feedback on what
worked (or didn't) with that, or what Ello's missing, could be of interest.

(No stake in the company -- I use the site and pass on regular feedback,
praise, and criticisms.)

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overcast
So sad Yahoo did absolutely nothing with this icon of photography websites.
I've been revisiting old photos, and moving them over to my own personal site.
It's probably inevitable that one day we'll all get the notice that Flickr is
shutting down, and you have X amount of days to save your photos.

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midgetjones
If anyone is looking for a good way to sell their photos and isn't
shutterstock/getty/etc, I can recommend
[https://www.picfair.com/](https://www.picfair.com/)

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Altay-
My only experience with Flickr was uploading tens of thousands of images with
links to my websites for 'link juice' back when Google was stupid and eas(ier)
to game. Ah, the good ol days....

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cpdean
what are some good flickr alternatives for when they fully nix the product
(store and manage all your photos)?

~~~
dvcrn
I've been using 500px lately for my publicly available photos. Seems to be the
most popular alternative.

For private stuff I am hosting the originals on my own NAS and upload a copy
in Google Photos for easy searching.

~~~
jmathai
You might enjoy my Automated workflow with Synology and Goolge Photos.

[https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-
personal...](https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal-
exif-based-photo-and-video-assistant-d92868f302ec#.nqyoae9ny)

[https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-
usin...](https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-google-
photos-and-elodie-afb753b8c724#.humerckqa)

~~~
cpdean
whoa this is pretty cool!

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ijafri
>Flickr is shutting down

