

Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr - nickbilton
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/flickr-has-the-opportunity-to-become-the-next-flickr/
We don’t need another Web site or service to see pictures of someone’s lunch or their soy latte, or another teenager making a duck face.
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potatolicious
Speaking from the perspective of the photography-enthusiast category, I've
been coming to the conclusion that Google+ may become the next Flickr.

It has first-class communications features that Flickr has always sorely
needed. Commenting isn't a tiny box at the bottom with awful pagination, you
can upvote posts as well as comments, and it has group sharing capabilities
well beyond "add to pool".

The photo upload process is also far superior to Facebook, and the photo
viewing experience is superior also when it comes to high-resolution, high-
quality compression that many photographers desire. Facebook _butchers_
uploads with awful compression artifacts.

I've been seeing a _lot_ of amateur and professional photographers flock
towards G+ - doubly so since the launch of Communities.

Personally, I like using Google+ to talk photography a hell of a lot more than
I like to on Flickr. That might be telling.

~~~
bad_user
I wanted to say the same thing. Google+ has a lot of going for it when it
comes to photography.

Skipping over the UI, which is really, really good for photography consumption
(have you seen the iPad app? it's beautiful), Google+ has one freakishly big
advantage when comparing it with Facebook or Flickr that goes unmentioned:

Google Drive - because IMHO, online backup and carrying your huge collection
wherever you go, on whatever device, are far more valuable for photographers
than sharing.

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troymc
I often want a photo to illustrate a blog post, but I want one that I can use
legally, e.g. public domain or under a Creative Commons Attribution-Only (CC-
BY) license. Flickr provides an easy way to search for CC-BY photos in their
collections; I find it incredibly useful:

<http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/>

~~~
dageshi
Likewise, in my experience searching for CC photo's on flickr is significantly
better than searching for the same using google image search. Not so often you
find google being outdone by anyone...

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FireBeyond
Not likely - the new app offers mobile posting, and that's about it. The
Flickr site requires people to pay $25 a year to upload more than 200 photos,
and regardless of what you think of premium models, there's intense
competition. Flickr itself is stagnant. Years stagnant, we're talking.
Features, API integration. I'm really, honestly unsure, even subscribed to
their devblog and being a premium customer for 5+ years, what their dev staff
are actually doing.

I loved Flickr. It's on life support. And the prognosis is not good.

~~~
IheartApplesDix
I imagine they're working on scaling and bad content filtering mechanisms in
the back end, and integrating deanonymizaton from 3rd parties, and a secure
API for authorities as required by law. All of these wonderful features offer
nothing for the customer but probably help them make money from what is
otherwise freeloading traffic.

Anyone else who's trying to create a flikr clone should take these
requirements into consideration when designing your architecture and
calculating your TCO. Map reduce fleets needed for these kind of analyses
after the fact is not cheap and you want to have that stuff hitting the ground
so you can start working on new features right away. When flikr was made 5
years ago, these kind of features weren't really a consideration for someone
with an old user-as-the-customer-model in mind. Stewart Butterfield a co-
founder resigned in 2008, stating that he was an old tin man in a new age.

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newishuser
Paying flickr user here. Flickr is perfect and that's it's problem. I don't
need social integration, I don't need filters, I don't need multi-platform
sharing. I need an automatic resizer and reliable CDN and flickr is a
remarkable both of those.

Flickr is not dead nor is it on life support, it's just not interesting. But
just because something's not interesting doesn't mean it's not exceptionally
useful. Flickr's search is best in show, it's CDN is always fast and reliable
and API is comprehensive.

A massive user-base and obnoxious valuation don't make something important,
sometimes just being useful, even if underutilized, is good enough.

edit: it also contains many amazing collections that are easily browsable,
searchable, and aren't under threat of disappearing from the internet 'cos of
a passing fad.

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/>

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/sets/>

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/sets/>

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives/sets/>

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jmathai
Absolutely not.

The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which
has withered. They aren't going to out engineer or out pace any smaller
competitor.

Basically, the only thing they have is gone and is going to be very hard to
get back. In Internet speak they abused their community by abandoning them for
years.

By "they" I mean the bureaucracy I came to know so well while at Yahoo!. And
no, Marissa Mayer can't save the day on this one.

Facebook won the casual social sharing of photos and 500px is winning on the
"professional" side.

Disclaimer: I'm a founder of OpenPhoto. We're not fighting the same fight as
Flickr though so I'm an external party on this specific topic.

~~~
kaiuhl
Just because you have the institutional memory of Flickr during its fall from
grace doesn't mean the rest of the internet, particularly the younger
generation, does.

Instagram has proven that social networking around "artistic" photos has an
audience. If Flickr can be the more professional, big-boy Instagram (maybe
even with a website!), then I can see it attracting a new audience.

~~~
jmathai
But what I'm saying is that it is more likely that someone else wins that
race.

The only thing Flickr has going for it is their _existing_ community who have
largely abandoned it. They're not going acquire a "new" community better than
their smaller competitors.

Case in point. It took them years to release mobile apps. Then a year to
release a major update. That's millenniums on the Internet.

If you think Yahoo! can change that, well, you haven't worked there :).

~~~
mc32
I think Flickr still has the chance to rescue itself. There are still some
vibrant communities. Say you want to learn/discuss wedding photography, or
maybe you want to learn about portraiture photography, or staged photography,
there are very active and content rich communities.

What flickr can do is expand on the tools they've provided those communities.
Right now, there are a few sticking points:

-Comments --they're not sortable, they don't have a mechanism to up/down vote relevant irrelevant comments.

-Search --it's horrible. Searching for a comment/thread you kind of recall and want to find? Lost cause.

-Galleries --they need to improve this. If you want to curate and showcase a theme, whatever, it's very difficult to do, aside from creating side-groups.

-Accepting/curating photos into pools. They need to introduce 'AND' in addition to the 'OR' mechanism to allow images into pools which require admins to 'approve' images.

-A way to 'elect' admins by the members. Admins tend to tire after a few year and allow their groups to wither. The solution now is to go and create your own group. That loses lots of rich history (discussion threads). It would be nice to be able to 'vote' in new admins, in groups which elect to be set-up that way.

LSS, if they revamp some core functionality and improve the communication
tools (and adding something akin to @messaging), they have an eager audience.
Lots of the 'serious' users, actually do care about their communities and
actually follow the managerial follies always hopeful that things will change
for the better --sure some have left for FB, 500px. Some of those have found
that FB incurs a cost -the cost of not being able to have aliases, privacy
issues, etc.

~~~
jmathai
You're probably right. Especially if you're involved in one of those. I'm not,
so it's a side of Flickr I don't see.

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lancefisher
"People loved — I mean loved! – Flickr"

This is true for me. Flickr was the first web service I paid for, and I still
do. It really was a generational leap at the time. Photos were meant to be
shared, and they nailed it. Tagging and tag clouds, folksonomy, embeddable
badges - these were all fresh back then and they worked well. If only they
would have added the ability to tag friends early on, I think it could have
taken the place of some social networks.

I really do hope flickr becomes the next flickr. I keep putting my photos
there, because I like to have them in one place. However, I do have to admit
that sharing them on facebook creates much more interaction and fun.

~~~
bad_user
I used to backup my photos on Flickr, but Flickr is awful for backups. You
can't upload lengthy videos, you can't backup your raw files, retrieving your
whole collection back from Flickr is extremely painful, etc...

So recently I'm switching to Google Drive for my backup needs.

~~~
aes256
I know a lot of people who also used flickr primarily as a backup solution.
Sharing their photos with strangers on the Internet was always a secondary
motivation.

This may, at least in part, explain flickr's gradual decline. In the age of
cheap 3TB hard drives, 64GB SD cards, and cloud backup solutions, flickr seems
a little old-hat.

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troymc
"Either way, there is currently a gaping void on the Web for people to share
higher-resolution beautiful photos."

500px seems to do that quite well.

<http://500px.com/>

~~~
potatolicious
Ehh... I disagree somewhat. 500px is another beast entirely, with its own
(huge) set of problems. As an avid photographer myself I can't really get
behind it.

To summarize a large argument: 500px has an _extremely_ strong groupthink,
leading to a very confined set of photos that its community prefers. It is
much stronger than any other photo site I've come across, including Flickr.

Its notion of beauty is very firmly in the territory of tourist-kitsch, and
the single-mindedness of its community prevents it from catering to, well, any
photo enthusiasts who desire something different. Heavily processed long-
exposure landscapes, extreme telephotos of animals/birds, and scantily-
clad/naked beautiful women - those three topics alone dominate that site.

500px's photos lean towards high production values, it does not lead to either
discourse about photography as a craft or deep sharing. Which is to say, it is
unlikely to replace existing photography communities, nor is it likely to take
the mainstream like Flickr, or Instagram. The community shuns serious
photographers outside of its narrow niche, it also shuns casual amateur
shutterbugs like mom and dad's point and shoot, and it shuns "artsy" lo-fi
photos like Instagram. Breaking that community out of its self-constructed
(and very, very small) box I think will be the 500px team's greatest
challenge.

~~~
telepoiss
I agree with that. 500px is a bit elitist (although does have a lot of
'quality' photography in the mainstream sense). Flickr on the other hand is a
lot more loose and if one knows how/what to search, there can be real gems and
aspiring new artists to be discovered, alongside all the old masters.

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purecaffeine
Geez about time - not that I know whether Flickr is worth the investment, but
as a heavy user of Flickr since pre-Yahoo, I'm glad it's making a comeback ...
clear out those cobwebs!

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joonix
>Could Flickr create a beautiful magazinelike iPad application that allows
people to skim through high-resolution images on the service?

How does this Flickr app not already exist? I'm pretty sure a couple of 20yr
old coders could make an app like this in a day or two if they had access to
Flickr's data. The hard part isn't displaying images on a tablet, its having
the high quality images in the first place.

~~~
n0nick
Well, go ahead then :) The APIs are out there...

IMO the challenge here is defining the right UX and brand. Not to say that it
shouldn't be done, I'd much rather Flickr achieving this than Instagram (=
Facebook) or any other current player in the market.

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89a
Flickr is a brilliant lesson in how not to run a company

