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
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.
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.
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...
According to wikipedia, Facebook was actually started the same month as flickr (Feb. 2004). del.icio.us was another notable "Web 2.0" site that did predate flickr.
It was also one of the first metadata rich photo sets that was publicly available. Prior to every large company seeing data as their primary source of income Flickr had their open data API and a lot of interesting science was done using Flickr's images and metadata.
Unfortunately there's really no equivalent pool of photographic content--including CC and public domain content. If flickr were to shutdown, a huge amount of content would be lost.
I sort of agree with you but in another sense it remained true to its roots as a photo publishing platform, mostly, for amateurs. But the mass market was fine with putting some pics up on facebook. And serious professionals have other markets more explicitly aligned with their needs.
Perhaps this could be a clarion call for volunteers to start transitioning the CC and public domain content to archive.org, assuming Flickr gives enough notice that such a shutdown were to occur.
I think this is a bit of a hyperbole. To me the definitive feature of the internet is the potential it offers in networking services, offering accessibility to great pools of data and serving as a forum to cheaply create networks of value from producers to customers.
In this scope a public repository of photographic data is one embodiment of this potential. Just changing the behaviour of this single embodiment does very little to affect the fabric of the internet.
Maybe there are social bubbles for whom flickr is much more important but if I had to list any number of internet services that I consider markable flickr would have not been on that list.
Ironically, I think the site that has killed the market for commercial photos is Yahoo's other free photo hosting service: Tumblr. Image copyright is now practically a dead letter if you're an amateur.
> Image copyright is now practically a dead letter if you're an amateur.
Why would an amateur care about copyright? The whole point of copyright is to grant a monopoly to a work's creator in order for him to make money. If he's trying to make money, he's not an amateur (viz., someone doing it out of love — hence the word).
An amateur certainly wouldn't care about the market for commercial photos!
If you're an amateur photographer, you don't have the resource to do anything other than occasionally google image search your own stuff and send a few DMCA notices.
Whereas tumblr is built on - literally made out of - the reproduction of images without the permission of the copyright holder.
There's no RIAA or MPAA for photographs that has the clout to force platforms to redesign their systems to pro-actively check for copyright infringement.
(I'm trying to scrupulously avoid saying which side is right here, just describing the situation)
Interesting - it's not an area that I know a lot about. I had just come across a Vancouver company called Copypants (https://www.copypants.com/) that is targeting this issue, (I have no affiliation), and so your comment made me curious.
I agree. My account has grown to over 10,000 photos and videos of my family, from our early dating, wedding, two kids. It's all pretty easily searchable, well-organized, and simple to back up. We've been using it since Bush was in office.
I don't know of any other tool or service that makes it as easy as Flickr does for my wife and I to collectively maintain a library of family photos. I will happily maintain my Flickr Pro subscription for as long as the service stays in business.
I was a heavy Flikr user for quite a long time; until the new laws were pushed (in the UK at least) to allow the likes of google to declare 'untraceable' images as fair game for their own business needs.
It's now too easy for corporation to rip off the work of photographers, so I removed the content I had online, and will only post the odd photo to my G+ these days. Not the 'stream' of stuff I used to do with Flikr back then.
They're laws that don't get enforced because the companies are simply too large and can get away with it. It's more effective and more profitable for the court systems to go after the smaller 'offenders.'
