
Dear Marissa Mayer...please make Flickr awesome again - andrewudell
http://dearmarissamayer.com/
======
blhack
Here's a little bit of perspective for everybody in this thread:

A good friend of mine, who travels the world taking breathtaking photos [as
in: this is what she does to make her living] still hosts a lot of her photos
on _photobucket_.

Photobucket, if you're lucky enough to never have used it, is a _mess_. It
downsizes your pictures dramatically, it makes directly linking to them
difficult, the UI is ugly; it's terrible.

When I ask her why she still uses it, she responds with "I don't know. I've
always used it. It has all my photos."

\--

Guys, we're all programmers, or designers, or both. To my friend, the place
where she stores her photos is barely an afterthought. If it can get to a
point where she can send somebody a link and have them see a picture, then
good. She doesn't care, because she's too busy out making new photos.

WE care, because we spend our time making new websites, but don't get confused
into thinking that the rest of the world (that would be: our potential users)
care very much.

They don't.

People want an easy way to share photos that doesn't feel like it's getting in
their way. Right now a lot of people are using facebook because it does that.
They don't care if it downsizes everything, if somebody wants to original,
they can send it to them.

~~~
edj
_> Guys, we're all programmers, or designers, or both._

I'm quite certain HN participant aren't all programmers or designers. They're
not all guys, either.

~~~
blhack
"Guys" is the gender-neutral term for a group of mixed gender people.

Here is an interesting discussion on the topic:
[http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11816/is-guy-
gend...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11816/is-guy-gender-
neutral)

Also if this is confusing, I'd suggest taking classes on a language other than
English. I know that at least in French, mixed-gender-groups take the
masculine plural form.

In fact, here is another discussion (same site):
[http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19074/what-is-
a-f...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19074/what-is-a-feminine-
version-of-guys)

"Guys" can also refer to a group of women.

~~~
panacea
I often leave work by saying 'cheers guys' or 'have a good evening guys' to a
mixed gender group and then ponder in the elevator down if, perhaps, I've
offended females with my casual nomenclature?

I think it probably _is_ slightly misogynistic. Not my personal intent, but
inherited from history?

What term could I use instead? 'Guys and Gals' seems old fashioned and too
wordy. And the set order of the list might imply something. 'People' seems too
cold.

I reckon using "guys" as a gender-neutral term for a mixed gender bunch is ok.

~~~
batista
> _I think it probably is slightly misogynistic. Not my personal intent, but
> inherited from history?_

Do you _hate_ women? If not, then it's not misogynistic.

Enough already with the stupid guilt trips over everything and anything!

------
georgespencer
I mean this sincerely: why?

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.

~~~
tibbon
Consider for a moment that the pro/prosumer market is large enough to sustain
several businesses which have much higher per-sale costs. Look at all of the
camera gear companies out there. Definitely a sustainable business, but Flickr
needs some serious rebranding and updating. They need to hammer in to users
that putting photos from your $4,000 camera rig on Facebook is just silly.

~~~
blhack
>They need to hammer in to users that putting photos from your $4,000 camera
rig on Facebook is just silly.

The people putting photos into facebook don't have $4000 camera rigs. They
have $500-1000 camera rigs, and the photos that they're taking are [often]
taken using the pop-up flash, the kit lens, and automatic mode.

For them, putting photos into facebook is a completely reasonable thing to do,
and their photos wouldn't gain anything by being stored on flickr.

~~~
rabidonrails
Sounds like you guys agree:

IF you are a professional THEN flickr is the place for you. However, IF you
are an amateur THEN Facebook is just fine.

We all agree that if you're taking a picture with a $4000 camera you lose
something by throwing that up on Facebook.

~~~
starpilot
I think this is it. Flickr content is much more searchable via tags, Facebook
not so much. The focus in Flickr is subject matter and actual photography,
with Facebook it's more about people and experiences within networks. Many
Facebook photos are uninteresting to people other than the friends of the
originator.

Publishers regularly search Flickr for photos to license and use. I'm a point-
and-click shooter, but out of the blue I received two messages asking to
publish one of my photos (which I had tagged descriptively). I was paid, and I
learned how to complete invoices and W-9s, and had the joy of seeing my photo
published with credit in a food magazine no one reads (Whole Foods sold it
briefly). Yahoo could better highlight Flickr's ability to connect publishers
with casual photo-takers, by facilitating thorough tagging of photo contents
and improving the search ability. Flickr's definitely a much larger and open
body of content than Facebook for this purpose.

------
bijanv
I think enough photographers have moved over to 500px (<http://500px.com>) to
make Flickr a garbage dump of whatever you export from your digicam. And even
still I feel people are preferring to do that through Dropbox now.

I'm not really sure what Flickr could even potentially have going for it
anymore to 'become awesome again'.

~~~
deveac
_> to make Flickr a garbage dump of whatever you export from your digicam. _

Sounds like a potential (massive) advantage to me. Having your service be
ground zero for export from your cam and contain all your content? That can be
exploited to good effect.

~~~
smacktoward
Even better, work with camera and phone manufacturers to _build Flickr into
the camera_. Take a picture, a copy goes to Flickr automatically. Make it a
natural part of the photo-taking process -- one that you'd miss when using a
device where it wasn't present. ("I have to do _what_ to share my photo? Open
an app? Connect a _USB cable?_ Ugh.")

This is one of the few areas where Flickr/Yahoo could still conceivably
compete with Facebook; since FB doesn't have a "Facebook phone" yet, they'd
both be in the same competitive position of needing to get camera and phone
OEMs to buy in.

~~~
logic
You just described the level of integration G+/Picasa has with my Android
phone: every photo I take is automatically uploaded to a (private) folder on
there.

For many of us, Flickr's appeal is that it's (self-)curated: you've picked
your best stuff to upload. Features like "explore" reward this; popular
content is highlighted, while those who just upload every photo they take tend
to not get any attention at all. They've effectively trained the userbase to
share good content (insofar as the userbase is capable of producing, anyway).

It's the reason a lot of Flickr users, particularly the ones who produce good
content, are interested in 500px: quality counts.

That dynamic would change quickly if everyone were encouraged to dump
everything they take onto Flickr. It would devalue the service for many of us:
nobody wants to see fifteen different perspectives of the same "moss on a
rock", taken in rapid succession, but that's what your contact stream would
end up filled with. You can only remove people as contacts for so long, before
you decide it's no longer worth the trouble and jump ship.

Flickr isn't Photobucket or Picasa, and that's a good thing.

------
magoon
I subscribed to Flickr Pro because I loved the idea of all of my photos backed
up 'in the cloud' and available on my devices/computers without having to
copy/sync, but it didn't work out that way. Flickr never developed any good
connectors for uploading photos or integrating with photo software. Ultimately
I tried a hodgepodge of different third-party attempts, most of which had
issues. AppleTV's flickr implementation doesn't allow you to view your own
private albums - another disappointment.

Note also that when your Pro lapses, they only let you access a subset of your
photos, holding most hostage. I do understand the reasoning behind this, but
the service wasn't meeting my expectations so I was frustrated having to pony
up more money to access what I had in my account.

Flickr has such potential, if only they keep up progression.

~~~
nicholassmith
The Lightroom Flickr plugin is pretty good, but that's more angled at pros
really.

------
endersshadow
I've never been anything but a casual consumer of flickr, so I'm a bit out of
touch--what is it that Yahoo changed to make it not awesome? Can anybody
explain to me what changes they'd like her to make?

~~~
shawnee_
Before Facebook became huge, Flickr was probably the most promising social
photo-sharing site.

But there's definitely still a niche for people who _don't_ want to weave
every single aspect of their online identity together in one profile. If
Yahoo! can allow Flickr the independence to emulate the photo-sharing aspects
of FB without the "we're tracking your every move" rapacious identity
profiling of FB, it should be able to revive the brand. Not only that, Flickr
might actually become the kind of "Facebook-like" place that Yahoo 360 tried
to be, or that Google Plus is still working on becoming.

~~~
geon
Like a github for photos?

------
sidcool
Once I had a discussion with an engineer of the Photos team on Facebook. We
were discussing a probable employment opportunity for myself on the photos
team. My resume was below average as per their requirement. I was told that
facebook holds more than 85% of the world's social photos, much much more than
Flickr. But still it had a team of less than 30 engineers doing all the stuff.

Flickr on the other hand, to manage a much smaller product had around 150
engineers. This was a year ago, so the stats might have changed.

I just thought this was relevant to this thread.

~~~
joshaidan
Didn't Instagram have a team of less than 10 people? (or close to that number)
I'm not entirely sure what their market share was, but I believe they were
growing pretty quickly prior to being purchased by Facebook.

------
nekojima
There are just too many product posts to be made where Yahoo! can "please make
______awesome again".

------
sjwright
I currently maintain a travel photo journal site for my sister, it has a
database of about 30,000 photos, and I'm sure they'd love to be able to add
more.

Now I'd _LOVE_ to be able to ditch the code I've written and hand them over to
a $nn/month commercial service offering even vaguely similar functionality. It
doesn't need much. Just the ability to correct timezone issues and time offset
problems between multiple cameras, a simple way to add approximate geographic
data, and nice publishing options that aren't advertisements for the service
I'm paying for.

This would be like a week's work for a site like twitter.

And even though I'd be willing to compromise greatly on many fronts, I've
found nothing that even remotely resembles the broad theme of what I built.
Yet it would be perfect for anyone who goes on a long holiday and takes lots
of photos.

This sucks.

------
michaelbuddy
I've moved to OpenPhoto. It can use S3, and Dropbox accounts, your photos and
your comments are your own. It's open source and the dev team is making
strides.

------
danso
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.

~~~
raverbashing
Yes

I'm afraid flickr is still better than Picasa/G+ photos (even though G+ photos
are very good and a definite improvement over Picasa)

I believe flickr can still "be revived"

------
basicallydan
I think this comes from the desire for the Internet to be our little cool
exclusive playground like it used to be - the communities were only filled by
tech-savvy people who were interested in seeing what great things the Internet
could do for them.

Now, the communities are more reflective of large-scale real-life communities,
and the days of exclusivity are gone.

That doesn't mean we can't still have our cool, exclusive communities like
Flickr where great content is shared and applauded and modified, etc. - it
just won't be as special as it used to be, and it won't have a very wide
impact.

------
pwenzel
Disagree. Flickr is still awesome.

------
vph
flickr was the first of its kind. Huge potentials. It's too bad Yahoo! dropped
the ball there.

------
brasmasus
Wat? I use it a lot for images I embed in sites and I think it's great. All
I'd add is sticky settings in the iphone app (e.g. so I don't have to
explicity deny location info for each photo individually), and a slightly more
streamlined resize interface.

------
snorkel
You're much more likely to see a whole new photo sharing service from Yahoo
rather than an attempt to revive the Flickr brand. Once a brand has stagnated
and everyone has moved on then it's extremely difficult to regain that
audience, kind of like Yahoo.

------
vipervpn
First, PROTECT Flickr and ensure it's part of Yahoo's core, and then improve
it.

But Flickr is pretty awesome as is. I use it almost daily. It's almost as
valuable as Wikipedia IMO.

------
duncan
you guys should check out openphoto

------
purephase
I think 500px is taking on this space already. They appear to be doing fairly
well.

------
arrowgunz
You just stole my words.

------
webjunkie
Why?

------
wavephorm
You could probably just go down the list that 37 Signals made of companies
that Yahoo acquired:

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2777-what-happens-after-
yahoo...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2777-what-happens-after-yahoo-
acquires-you/)

