All posts in photography

Maybe I complain about Flickr so much because I’m personally disappointed. I was an early adopter (pre-Yahoo), and for years it was one of the sites I visited numerous times a day. It was an archive, a sharing tool, a hosting platform and a social network (that last part is huge, considering it was 2004), and over the years it’s been hard to watch it shrivel.

Perhaps most disappointing is that it still has potential. Yes, we use Facebook and Instagram more frequently, and they’re both better at real time and social sharing, but Flickr’s community still has value for photography (and could, on some other planet, compete with the more on the go platforms) proper. The groups still have value. The user influenced tagging system still has value. The people who curate their own streams have value. Just recently I found an old high school friend’s account full of photos from my youth that I had no idea existed. I couldn’t find that on Instagram. Privacy variants on Facebook make it less than ideal when it comes to search and universal sharing. Additionally, Flickr offers tools for gathering stock images, desktop backgrounds, free-to-use photos of bands and events, etc. and could continue to be a sort of social database for American culture if anyone really gave a damn about the users, but no one really seems to anymore.

Regardless, the bottom line is still true: Flickr is mostly dead. The Gizmodo article “How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet” is a great historical read, explaining the history of the company’s relationship with Yahoo and what went wrong (and more). I highly recommend reading it and am glad to see that its loss is something the web community sympathizes with and mourns.

“There’s a difference between a missed opportunity and a complete fuck-up. When Yahoo failed to capitalize on Flickr’s social potential, that was a missed opportunity. But if you want to see where it completely fucked up, where it just butchered Flickr with dull knives and duller wit, turn on your phone and launch the Flickr app. Oh, what’s that, you don’t have one? Exactly.”

There’s a lot of real talk in there, and it’s all completely on point. I’m sure that Fake and Butterfield and Champ all feel a twinge of angst when they see articles like this one, but they made a choice. The bigger question in all of this is around startups selling out to big companies with Corporate Dev divisions and bosses who might not always truly understand the potential in a platform or app. That’s ok, it’s not always crystal clear. But leaving something as promising as Flickr by the side of the road is maybe one of the saddest things that’s ever happened to the historically social Internet user base. The only way it could become viable again is if it was purchased by Facebook – and then we’d have a whole different beast and set of problems.

RIP, Flickr.