
Flickr is dead - wspruijt
http://thomashawk.com/2011/08/flickr-is-dead.html
======
potatolicious
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.

~~~
brlewis
It's ripe for multiple disruptors. Photos are a communication medium that
serves multiple purposes, just as words do. Some photos are your portfolio.
Others are your memories. They call for different interactions.

Flickr, Smugmug and 500px are very portfolio-oriented. Snapjoy and my site
(OurDoings) are very memory-oriented.

Facebook and Google+ are social-oriented. They're great for sharing what you
did yesterday, but awkward for nostalgia. I anticipate both the portfolio- and
memory-oriented sites acting as home base, but feeding out to the Facebook and
Google+ for social interaction.

~~~
bad_user

         Flickr, Smugmug and 500px are very portfolio-oriented
    

Oh, I wish Flickr were portfolio oriented.

Unfortunately they have this bizarre concept of a photostream in which you
cannot rearrange the order of photos, and they happen in the order of upload
and not the date on which they were taken.

Also, while logged in, you cannot filter your own photostream by public /
family-only / private photos only. It can be quite annoying, since I have
thousands of family-only photos and only dozens of public photos, so I have to
log out to see how my photostream looks to outsiders.

~~~
Terretta
Both of your complaints are mistaken.

You can arbitrarily reorder your photostream (not just sets, your actual
photostream), and you can check the organizer to filter your photostream for
only public photos.

~~~
monkeypizza
how do you do that?

~~~
Terretta
One way, for example:

<http://flickrstream.webzardry.com/>

The key is "upload date" which is editable, and determines the order.

If you don't have a tool for it, go to your set in the organizer, sort the set
as you want, go to the first photo, open the edit modal dialog, and start
stepping through the photos setting the upload time to 1 second after the
last. When you're done, the photo stream itself will reflect the custom order.

Sets already reflect your custom order with no extra work. Some Flickr tools
(of which there are hundreds) support reordering the photo stream, using this
technique under the hood.

Since everything on Flickr has an API, you can do most anything you can
imagine.

~~~
monkeypizza
wow, that's awesome. I hadn't realized they had made upload date writable!
This has some interesting possibilities. It is somewhat too bad that changing
it will wipe out the original photo upload date, though - for photos which
don't have the date taken in the exif, there will be no time history of the
photo left.

------
ajays
Thomas Hawk is a well-known Flickr hater. He keeps bashing Flickr at every
chance he gets. And then he continues to use Flickr. I've been reading his
"Flickr is dead" and "I hate Flickr" rants for years and years. He tried to
start a competing service, but it failed miserably; so he continues to bash
Flickr instead.

Dude: if you don't like Flickr, don't use it. Plain and simple. And if you
think you can build a better product, go ahead and build it.

The world would be a much better place with fewer whiners and more doers.

~~~
9999
When he noted that he had been banned from their help forum a lot of alarm
bells went off for me.

~~~
drgath
Well, considering he trolls the blogosphere with a new "Flickr is Dead"-type
post every month, I can't imagine he was very helpful within the help forums
and was doing more harm than good.

------
acangiano
I'm surprised he hasn't disclosed it himself, but it's worth noting that the
author has tried his own hand at this problem with the site Zooomr.com. Things
didn't work out though and the site never took over Flickr.

~~~
vbone
Exactly, I am at a loss to explain why so many people continue to fanboy this
blowhard.

He has expressed on multiple occasions his dissatisfaction but fail to
disclose his conflict of interest as well as the fact that if he really really
hates the service so much he can take it elsewhere or try to start his own (oh
wait, that didnt work out).

~~~
raganwald
Be careful not to accidentally commit a _Circumstantial Ad Hominem_. His so-
called conflict of interest has no bearing on whether his argument is cogent.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2868269>

;-)

------
Terretta
Except that this gentleman has previously complained about Flickr censorship,
yet completely ignores that Google+ is far more restrictive and has already
been accused of pulling people's photos (e.g. Lego cleavage[1]) and pulling
non "real name" accounts. I don't think he's thought this through.

1\. [http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/did-google-ban-
cl...](http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/did-google-ban-cleavage-
snuggling-lego-stormt)

~~~
ja27
Flickr has had and continues to have plenty of problems over arbitrarily
deleting accounts.

------
ANH
One thing Flickr has going for it is photos aren't so closely tied to a user's
identity. I'm a bit of a photography buff, a Flickr Pro user for years, and
I'm not sure I _want_ my photographs to be in the same place where I update
friends and acquaintances about my status. It's an entirely different thing to
me.

The article has it right, though, about Flickr's lack of updates. The most
recent major change I've noticed was a year or two ago and, IMHO, it made the
site worse.

~~~
bane
"I'm a bit of a photography buff, a Flickr Pro user for years, and I'm not
sure I want my photographs to be in the same place where I update friends and
acquaintances about my status. It's an entirely different thing to me."

Absolutely agree. I'm a hobbyist travel photographer, so I end up with
essentially two kinds of photos: photos of a place, where I try and form a
nice composition, post process (crop, colors, balance, etc.) and then
carefully catalog on flickr (for the former, I might take 20,000 photos during
a week, and end up with a couple dozen really choice ones I want to keep in
this way), and cheesy photos of me and my family at these places, mostly
goofing off with statues or whatever.

The semantics of the two kinds of photos couldn't be different. So I use FB
and G+ for the latter, and flickr most definitely for my carefully curated
former.

~~~
brk
How can you possibly take 20,000 photos in a week? The math just doesn't work
out, if you spent only 10 seconds composing a shot (and I'd argue it takes
longer than that if you are a "photographer" and not a drive-by "snapshotter")
that amounts to 8 hours per day of JUST picture taking, leaving no time to
even move from location to location.

Also, the average DSLR has a shutter life expectancy of around 100000-150000
cycles. I doubt you're replacing your camera body every 5 trips.

~~~
bane
It's not that hard. You're assuming I'm only take one shot of a scene. It's
really not that hard to take 3 or 4 a second in some cases. If I'm shooting a
panorama, I might take 12 or 13 shots in ~10 seconds.

I usually shoot more like 10,000-15,000 in a week, but I've gone closer to
20,000 in a couple cases. It's only 1500 photos a day for a 10,000 shot week.
Which averages just a bit over 1 a minute for an 8 hour day (but who says I
only spend 8 hours out and about?) but in truth, the shot times are more
clumpy. For example, I shot about 30 photos in 2 minutes of Vasari's fresco
inside the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo). I'll probably
combine all those into one or two larger photos stitched up.

Differently, walking up to the same Basilica along a street in Florence
offered several very different compositions of the same street. In 5 minutes I
was able to shoot 20 pretty decent shots, and probably 1 or 2 really good
ones.

That's 50 shots of the same building in a total of 7 minutes.

Riding on local public transport often gives you views of lots of neat things,
and only one or two seconds to shoot them.

I'm not even counting the family photos I also took in the meantime.

And yes, I'll actually probably start looking for a replacement camera body
sometime next year. I shoot with a D60, so it's only about $400-450...trivial
compared to the cost of 5 or 6 2- week trips overseas.

My wife used to think I was crazy, but now years later, going over these old
photo archives, we can remember in fantastic detail many of the great places
we've traveled together.

------
tricolon
No photographer will take Google+ seriously as long as uploading an artistic
nude could result in your entire Google account being disabled.

~~~
ja27
Flickr will close your account over a single photo not having the appropriate
safety level setting and plenty of photographers take it seriously.

------
spjwebster
I knew I'd heard that name before:

> _Flickr will be here long after you are and its cultural significance to our
> world will outlast your quarter to quarter financial results._

[http://www.businessinsider.com/an-open-letter-to-carol-
bartz...](http://www.businessinsider.com/an-open-letter-to-carol-
bartz-2010-12)

------
martingordon
Flickr may or may not be dead, but Google+ isn't going to replace it. The
great thing about Flickr is the discovery. Flickr has a ton of tools that help
you find other photographers (explore, tags, groups) and Google+ has none of
these.

Whereas Flickr enables and encourages users to seek out new contacts, it seems
to me that the purpose of Google+ is to better facilitate communication
between existing contacts. He doesn't mention this in the post, but does
anyone know how was the photo walk organized?

~~~
filmgirlcw
Exactly. Now, this isn't to say that Google couldn't create new solutions to
some of these problems, but I get the sense that at its core, Google+ isn't
going to be about discoverability per se, but about, as you say, connect with
people you already know.

Flickr's search is actually quite robust and amazing. I frequently use the
Creative Commons archives for my work as a writer. It's a fantastic resource.

Flickr might be dying, dead or stagnant, but I don't think that its
replacement will be a slightly rehashed Picasa. Instead, I'm guessing it will
be some sort of new network design that is able to surface photos from
multiple sites and accounts and identities.

------
hopeless
Here are a few things that have killed Flickr for myself and 80% of my
photographer friends:

\- Poor quality of work (or, rather, the good photography is buried under
mounds of dross). 500px has the advantage of being new, and limits monthly
uploads, so the quality there is surprisingly high

\- Vacuous comments. "Nice capture!". "Great shot!". This is only made worse
when looking at the horror-movie-esque overdone-HDR monstrosity.

\- Group and all flashing badge icons in comments

\- woeful mobile interface which is slow and eventually displays a non-
zoomable postage stamp sized image. I cringe whenever I see a Flickr link on
twitter

In short, Flickr might still be a place for photographs but not for
photographers. Actually, I think photoblogs or 500px combined with twitter
provide a great way of showing off your photos and getting great feedback from
people you respect.

------
EwanToo
The short version of the article is that Flickr hasn't changed in years, no
one at Yahoo seems interested in it, the community is drifting away, and
they're heading towards Google+.

I think this is pretty much true, though I'm not sure Google+ will really be
where everyone will end up - it certainly lacks a lot of things (like shared
circles for example), and whether Google will support those communities by
creating the features they want is really up in the air right now.

------
Tichy
Not that I have high hopes for Flickr, but sampling the trends going on a walk
with Google employees is probably a bit biased.

As for Flickr: isn't it strange how the products with the worst user
interfaces always seem to become the most popular? Same with Facebook.

~~~
ugh
Both Flickr and Facebook had awesome interfaces when they first became
popular. They just didn’t change enough or went in the wrong direction
afterwards.

~~~
tmcw
Much the same with Google Plus. It takes serious effort for growth and the
infinite strength of 'user needs' not to clobber a good interface with lots of
cruft that most users don't want.

------
gchucky
Sensationalist title aside, I think Google+ and Flickr fill two different
niches: the former is for the social sharing of images, whereas Flickr appeals
more to a professional/enthusiast group. One thing is that Flickr puts control
of image copyrights into the user's hand, whereas G+ doesn't really have that
at all. To that end, someone looking to protect their images would seem to
prefer Flickr, I should think.

------
Maro
I'm a weekend photographer and I recently became a paying Flickr user. For my
simple use-case of uploading files and sending off the URL to a couple of
friends per email Flickr is the perfect service.

~~~
lurker19
Why not use free PicasaWeb for this? $5 gets you bbasically unlimited storage.

The only answer I can say myself is that PicasaWeb uses the ugliest possible
lossy compression settings on all photos it displays.

~~~
Maro
Picasa is all integrated with the other Google services (which I'm a heavy
user of), but in the case of Picasa it results in a messy UX for me.

Eg. I just went to picasaweb.google.com to check out whether it's $5/mo or
$5/year, and what is shows me is a bunch of pictures from my G+ stream, but
the whole UX is confusing. It doesn't even have a front page (like
flickr.com). Where do I find pricing?

It seems to me that Flickr is better at the whole "do one thing and do it
well" paradigm and it results in a much smoother UX compared to the integrated
G+ mess.

EDIT: There's a tiny "Upgrade your storage" link at the bottom, pricing is
$5/yr for 20GB.

------
RexRollman
Yahoo, which once held great promise, seems to have become the company that
buys things and fails with them. Some examples off the top of my head:

Konfabulator (Yahoo Widgets), Geocites, Delicious, Flickr, Broadcast.com.

Heck, they don't even provide their own search results anymore. Can anyone
think of something that Yahoo has bought that has flourished under them?

~~~
lurker19
That's their business model. Yahoo is a media slaughterhouse, not a farm.

------
olefoo
Thomas Hawk has a long history of enthusiasm and rage; if his normal pattern
holds expect to see him lambasting Google for not adding his pet (absolutely
essential) feature in six months or so.

This latest enthusiasm has me puzzled though. I mean Google+ looks like it's
great for sharing photos of limited interest that aren't necessarily public.
But it doesn't strike me as a good place to present your art to the world.

I'm surprised that no one is selling turnkey photosharing sites that work off
an Amazon backend and that operators can skin with their own branding and mix
and match galleries and slideshow Javascript, and other features.

~~~
vbone
The more telling thing is that Thomas Hawk isn't even his real legal name
(Google it) so is in BLATANT violation of the Google+ real name policy.

Feel free to report it. I personally don't see why he should get a free pass
on this.

~~~
olefoo
I wouldn't report it because I try not to be an utter prat, on the internet or
IRL. But it is a telling instance of Google's hypocrisy on the issue of
pseudonymity.

------
bad_user
The problem with Facebook and now Google+ is that these are not specifically
designed for sharing photos.

Facebook gets more photos uploaded than Flickr can ever dream of, but they are
family pictures or pictures of drunken teenagers, of poor quality in general.
If you want to see art, Flickr is a wonderful place to discover amateurs with
talent and there's nothing out there that can beat it.

Also, I think a photo-sharing service has to have good tools for exploring
said pictures. On Flickr, even if it has many flaws, it is really cool to
search for pictures with a high interestingness score and then to start
following the people that took them. I found some breathtaking works of art
that way.

On Facebook and G+ you have to rely on your friends-feed instead for
discovery, but that's not how art is supposed to be discovered.

Flickr, for all its flaws, works for its intended purpose and can only be
killed by another web service that is created explicitly for photo-sharing.

Google is in a position to do that however, but with Picasa Web and not
Google+, although integration would be nice.

------
ChrisArchitect
a bit heavy on the google influence in the article....

I don't feel like G+ is at all geared to photographers. Flickr has tons of
features/tools that seem natural to many but are key to managing photos,
making sets, organizing etc. The meta data alone you can associate with flickr
photos is incredible. G+ can make a photo set in the same way Facebook can,
not really same target/point.

~~~
whazzmaster
I was thinking the same thing re: google influence. Also, was it any wonder
that at a photowalk attended by a ton of Google people, Google+ would be
talked about more than Flickr?

He makes some good points about the interface stagnation and community
excitement (even my own Flickr account has grown weedy and sparse over the
years.) However, it was off-putting to see so much, I don't know, what seemed
like personal vitriol next to evaluations of the service itself.

------
ja27
I'm not going to argue that Flickr isn't dying, but they do have some things
that Google+ and Facebook don't have: groups. A lot of groups are a waste, but
some well-administered groups are awesome, both for the group photo pools and
discussions.

The Strobist group is one example: <http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/>

------
xbryanx
Flickr is an amazing resource for sharing and using Creative Commons licensed
photos. We use it extensively in creating museum exhibits. I hope that Google+
makes it easy to search and share photos with Creative Commons licenses.

------
pkulak
Google+ finally made me move from Flickr. The integration between Google+ and
Picasa is really well done. Now I can upload HD video longer than a minute and
a half. I can easily share content with exactly who I want to (without them
needing an account anywhere). Before I had to upload family photos to Flickr
(world-public, of course, or no one was going to be able to figure out how to
see them) then email the album around or post it on Facebook. Now it's all in
once place and way easier.

------
acabal
I could never understand the appeal of Flickr. I've always found the UI to be
extremely confusing and close to unusable. Way back in the day I used to post
my travel photos there, mainly because back then there weren't that many
alternatives. None of my family could figure out how to use the site to view
my albums either.

Thank God we have a competitive market for this sort of stuff now so that I
haven't had a reason to visit Flickr in years.

------
InclinedPlane
Flickr hasn't much changed their business model or their service offering in a
long time, meanwhile online storage costs have dropped through the floor and
competitors have been innovating like crazy. There isn't quite a "flickr
killer" out there just yet for flickr's key users (avid and professional
photographers), but it's getting closer and closer.

------
Jun8
One thing I always thought that Flickr lacked was an integrated, easy way to
buy photos. I don't want to contact the photographer and wait for a reply,
when I need a photo for a slide, I want to be able to buy it instantly.

At this point Flickr seems like a site that just survives by inertia, nothing
new seems to be done, they have pretty much accepted defeat, I guess.

~~~
Terretta
It has this. The photographer needs to enable it.

------
ShardPhoenix
Maybe it's just because I'm not a photographer, but I'm surprised that
something like photo sharing can generate this much passion.

~~~
keithpeter
Wait till they start discussing quick release mechanisms for tripod heads. You
haven't seen anything yet.

------
cek
If Google really wanted to make this true, they'd add "Import from Flickr" to
the G+ Photo Upload page.

------
alrs
Infinite scrolling makes me nauseous. I literally feel sick to my stomach when
the bottom of the page is always yanked out of my grasp, Sisyphus-style.

------
nhangen
TLDR; Google+ has infinite scrolling, and Flickr does not, therefore Flickr is
passe and not supported by developers or the photo sharing community.

------
jsavimbi
In short, Mr. Hawk is pointing out that Flickr is no longer dedicating
resources to untangle a PHP codebase that has taken on a life of its own after
seven or eight years whereas Google+ is embracing photo-sharing as an integral
part of its new offering. Proof to that is that I have Brian Rose in my
circles right from the beginning and I had no clue who he was. A photo-walk
with the Facebook team? Can anyone even tell me who's on the Facebook photo
team? Flickr?

Flickr will not be rebuilt nor will it be offering incremental feature
upgrades of any importance going forward. I'd be surprised if they actually
had a dedicated development team versus a group of maintenance developers. The
managers are there to make sure I pay for my Pro account once a year and
report back to the board that the money is still rolling in.

Google+ pictures to help you share, discover and reinforce social
relationships, Flickr to store and organize your crap.

OMG does 500px suck. It's Flickr with a new theme and Stumbleupon integration.

------
hackermom
After 10 minutes his website finally loaded and I got a chance to read his
blog entry. What he backs his claim up with in the end is that a lot of his
photographer friends, some of which work for Google, talk about Google+
instead of Flickr, and that there's a tipping point situation happening
because the 10% that represent the "best" Flickr contributors are moving to
Google+.

------
Hisoka
Isn't there a chicken and egg problem for new entrants? There's not a lot of
photos to discover if you're building something brand new.

------
abava
site about "dead" Flickr is dead :-)

------
zobzu
thomashawk.com/2011/08/flickr-is-dead.html Connection timed out

Must have been hosted by flickr then.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Try <http://thomashawk.com.nyud.net/2011/08/flickr-is-dead.html>

------
buster
I don't know what the article is about, since the website seems to be down,
but i found Google+ to be an awesome photo community.

------
tripzilch
<http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/flickr.com>

I think it's just you.

Stupid sensationalist headline.

