Remembering Flickr

I joined flickr first time in 2002, I was an Erasmus exchange student in Sweden and had flat-bed scanned a bunch of darkroom prints before I went, I had the files on a cd. I bought a Sony laptop that year for £1000 and this became my window into the internet which I was only just starting to take seriously. I'm not sure why I didn't think photography and the internet worked but I did think that and only really used the internet for email, illegal music downloads and skateboarding forums. Soon enough I was uploading some scans to flickr and putting them into groups. I also started to get GAS after reading online articles - something that never happened back when I read photo magazines.

I became quite active on flickr for a while joining and contributing to quite a few groups. I was there when flickr superstar Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir (@_rebekka) had her photos ripped and some guy started selling them, her post highlighting this got taken down and caused an uproar. I was there when video came and many users deleted their accounts. I witnessed a young British photographer have her self portrait ripped and used as a cover on a porn DVD. I saw the rise of LomoKev in Brighton using Agfa Ultra 100 and also Toshihiro Oshima using Fuji Fortia. Kevin Mason (@Darkdaze) found a young model called Georgie Hobday who became huge. Some attractive (and quite young) users, playing for views, posted self portraits which attracted very seedy people.

When I went back to Sweden in 2008 I joined a fun group that posted pictures of the city I was living in and we all had to guess the location. That was fun and kept me shooting. By then I had sacked off my DSLR and was paying for lab scans to upload to groups. I bought and sold stuff in groups and got close to some people online. For a few years I paid for a pro account and uploaded thousands of private digital photos of archive material for my PhD research.

I started drifting away around 2010, I became rather alienated from the whole process of getting photos ready for upload and then getting stoked on view counts. Depressing; all that work for a comment like 'nice capture'. I hated all those insane HDR photos and awful attempts at the Orton effect. I was back in the darkroom and had no interest in having photos online.

Recently I've been back and it's a bit like a ghost town with all these absent users, their comments and photos preserved in aspic. You can scroll back to check reactions to Polaroid calling it quits, Ilford in trouble, Fuji's insane decision to cull Reala... It was a real community for a while, now it's dying.

I've been checking out the analogue photo groups on Reddit. A younger crowd, nice to see how they big each other up. The beginners' questions really strike me and the amount of young kids doing film is so good to see. In a sense, it's the kind of spirit which drew me to flickr nearly 20 years ago.

Well you wandered off. That is the answer. You left and many others did too. It's still there revive it!

Interesting. I’ve had a Flickr account since forever but could never get passionate about it. This is likely more about me than Flickr; I need to be amongst humans physically rather than virtually to get that feeling you’re describing.

in your reflections, did you see any noticeable changes when Smugmug bought the service?

I think I noticed a change when Yahoo insisted all users needed a Yahoo email, that was a hassle. I can't say I've noticed structural changes since the purchase but my visits are fleeting and driven by nostalgia. Finding users I followed nearly 20 years ago but now dormant. Groups are rudderless with absent moderators, they're now dumping grounds for hashtags. It doesn't work like it did because 100,000 users have moved to Instagram but they moved after they'd quit flickr so there's no IG handle in their profile to reconnect. Flickr was a computer based experience (like this forum), IG and Reddit are phone/tablet based. How I clicked around online finding inspiration on flickr seems remote now.

I like Flickr for viewing pictures and sharing them and its still one of the better venues for that. Instagram is lousy for looking at actual pictures, seems more about self promotion and photos of what ever I have floating in my fixer tray.
Ive never participated in any of the discussions on flickr, what's there to discuss that hasn't been discussed a hundred times over the internet.
Young people will constantly look for new venues to hang out in away from older people. Which is a shame as I enjoy their enthusiasm and creativity.

Reddit will revert to it's DNA at times though. I'm not a fan of Reddit in any form, but some of the photography parts are OK. Not much traffic on them however. Flickr can be handy for checking out stuff because it's all about the image, so looking at examples is nice. I'd never join them though. Really doesn't make sense since I'm all analog.

I only recently developed an effective way to digitize some of my larger prints. Maybe I could join?
https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/using-enlarger-as-a-copy-stand.183991/

perkeleellinen said:

...Reddit...​

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Photobucket went to bucket, Google Images were self-pooped by Google. But Flickr provides steady hosting under very reasonable price and human oriented GUI. Not a tumbr crap.

Flickr groups? For what? For text messages? Why? It was no forums in 2008-2010?

To have a chat I'm using photography forums. Since 2009. Those are way better than Reddit. Including this one. Good luck to post something this long as in OP on Reddit.

I'm using Flickr as long lasting images hosting and to look at others images. Not in the primitive IG form for mobile phone users by steering at tiny, smeared by greasy fingers mobiles screens. Flickr is perfect for those who are enjoying photography via large monitors and even with dedicated graphic cards.
Every time I want to see camera, lens rendering Flickr is unbeatable. Also, I'm following photogs from around the World on Flickr to be able to see real life and some artsy things. Again, at normal size and resolution.

Reddit is nothing but primitive forums. My google search for technical questions about bicycles returns short threads from it. Reddit is not only primitive, but annoying. It dumps totally nonrelated threads within same page which is clickbait. And to get to the actual thread, it has to be open again from same page, And every time I open Reddit it wants to use my google account. Aha, FOF.

momus said:

Reddit will revert to it's DNA at times though. I'm not a fan of Reddit in any form, but some of the photography parts are OK. Not much traffic on them however. Flickr can be handy for checking out stuff because it's all about the image, so looking at examples is nice. I'd never join them though. Really doesn't make sense since I'm all analog.

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Most of my public viewable images on Flickr are analog. Some are scans of DR prints. And I'm following many analog photography photogs to see their analog images on Flickr.
Analog is still analog via screen. And it is not just about me.

A core of users are still on Flickr. Yes, there are a lot of zombie accounts and groups, but that is inevitable with any such service that has existed for long enough, unless there is a way to auto-purge same. It was always about the images, as I see it--Flickr was never meant to be a social media site, and it is foolish to expect it to be Instagram or Snapchat.
BTW, Rebekka and Toshihiro are still posting now and then--they have not gone away, nor has Thomas Hawk, who is a real force of nature, a veritable image factory.

Though it has struggled to gain traction in the shadow of Flickr, Ipernity is also still around.

Instagram is photography stew - it's pictures of everything by everyone for every conceivable reason. It's less a photography platform than it is a "look at my workout clothes" or "look at my lunch" platform. Flickr really is a photography platform and so should have far fewer users than Instagram. One problem is Flickr does not offer the same level of self-promotion that Instagram does - mainly because of the difference in number of users. I don't know how effective self-promotion is on Instagram - but it must be at least somewhat effective or there wouldn't be so many people doing it. (The only one that comes to mind is the blue-haired photographer whose name is not Lina Bossanova but is something similar - she is featured by pretty much every film and paper company on Instagram. For a while, any photo I posted was liked by her - which suggests her account just likes every post with particular tags - there must be "an app for that".)
Anyway, Flickr is a different animal.

I like Flickr and use it to showcase my photos. I'm not a pro so it's fine for me. Some of the forums have gone down in traffic, that's true.

Make and share prints. Make or find a group.

Engage in the real photographic world.

No sniveling.

flickr groups have become a huge disappointment. Too many groups are orphaned (and thus, completely unmoderated), or are overwhelmed by the crap photos of a few group members who seem to just dump every-single-crap-photo they upload to as many groups as allowed. I've been an enthusiastic flickr user for a fairly long time and it seems to get less and less relevant every passing day.

It is hard to get enthusiastic about uploading your photographs to a site containing millions and millions of other photographs. Of course Facebook and Instagram are worse, containing billions and billions of other photographs.

I remember a few years ago when Flickr discontinued the free terabyte of space. Everyone was complaining. I was baffled. Who has a terabyte of keepers? Now it is limited to a thousand photographs. Who has a thousand keepers? Who wants to look at someone’s unedited photo dumps? And yet that is what Flickr largely contains.

A good exercise is to whittle your collection down to the top 100. Then to top 50. Then to top 25. Then to top 10. Do you really want to show people your just okay photographs? They might come to the conclusion that you are a just okay photographer.

I've never been interested in sharing my photos and hoping to get likes. I use SmugMug private galleries, and I email links to people who are interested in my photos (I shot a lot of my kids playing team sports in our town, so I shared with friends and family.)

Yes, Flickr is pretty dead. People upload photos, but there's very little discussion.

I don't know of anywhere else I can store my analog pics from 35 mm at 6144 pixels wide.
This is about the resolution coming from my scanners, it makes sense to store pics at scanner output IMO.
https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157711364062311
I have a big pile of silver gelatin prints and no more room for prints.

Alan Johnson said:

I don't know of anywhere else I can store my analog pics from 35 mm at 6144 pixels wide.
This is about the resolution coming from my scanners, it makes sense to store pics at scanner output IMO.
https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157711364062311
I have a big pile of silver gelatin prints and no more room for prints.

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I store my images on a NAS, and I use Backblaze for backup. There are options, fortunately, for people to choose what works best for them.

Que Mr Fawlty?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/98816417@N08/51003474547/in/dateposted-public/

Flickr is the only platform where I share my pictures, at least until they don't reach the fateful 1000 (564 right now). It preserves my files almost untouched (very subtle compression and no resizing) in an organized and informative way for the owner and for the viewer.

Old Gregg said:

Clicking on a Flickr link is like stepping on a dog shit by accident. The UI is so awful that I may look for a browser plug-in to just block Flickr links. The image usually occupies a tiny portion of the page, it is always postmark-sized by default and surrounded by a bunch of crap forcing you to scroll to see it! To switch to a bigger version you click on "all sizes" menu which opens another menu with just one menu item, saying "all sizes" again! It's like 5 clicks to see a single image WTF. And if you want to see just the image without the awful clutter around it, rick-clicking and "view image" doesn't work, you have to invoke developer tools, click "find element", expand and pull the URL of the fucking JPEG from there.

Flickr is a web service to make your images impossible to see.

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Jeeezzz...not my experience at all. What browser are you using? ... wait, are you trying to view flickr on a smart phone or tablet? Yeah, that's shit. Use a real computer with a real screen. Big difference!

I don't mind Flickr, its kind of like having a cup of coffee with an old friend.
its too bad people have to be so negative about everything...
its the internet and all those platforms are typically free ...
you don't like what Flickr or reddddit or IG or FB or (fill in the blank ) whatever has to offer
make a website and put your images there. websites are easy to make even free
I guess the problem is hosting is not free

Photobucket.....how has this company avoided being shut down by the Feds? They're still sending me emails on how I can "unlock" my photos. What they're doing is nothing less than extortion, but, it's the internet They can have my online scans, who cares?

Flickr is great because it has some people that actually do analog photography, and do it well, w/ many of them working exclusively w/ film. However, I never go there to ck out an image, it's usually because a web search brought up some Flickr info that looked interesting at the time. Looking at online scanned film images is sorta self defeating because the print's the thing, and who knows how much an online image has been "improved" w/ PS or whatever? It just doesn't help me at all w/ printing.

It's pretty funny hearing people discuss online communities as if they're real communities. Sorry, a community requires actual people interacting in person. I'm having difficulty envisioning that happening on a computer.

halfaman said:

Flickr is the only platform where I share my pictures, at least until they don't reach the fateful 1000 (564 right now). It preserves my files almost untouched (very subtle compression and no resizing) in an organized and informative way for the owner and for the viewer.

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That's what I found. Curious though. Why don't you share your Flickr link to your home page there in this forum in your signature block like I do? That way we can easily see your portfolio.