The Flickr Foundation

I just started using Flickr again, I&#x27;ve kept a pro account for years and years, as I didn&#x27;t want to lose what I uploaded and forgot about. I wanted to share some photos from a holiday, I tried to upload an album on FB and it just didn&#x27;t seem to be able to do it from the phone, madness.<p>I don&#x27;t much use FB or instagram anymore, I go through instagram every so often, when I don&#x27;t check things for months, and I scroll a few times and it tells me I caught up! FB and Instagram are mostly just sponsored or commercial posts on my feed, instagram just stops showing stuff from friends after a few scrolls, FB is maybe 1 in 3 posts are from my friends.<p>I share an album from Flickr and people get an ad free view of what I wanted to share, far superior.

Anyone remember the beginning of Flickr? It was really the best thing ever. Really! Glad to see this happen, big time.

I really think that Flickr has unrealised potential. One of the reasons photographers use Instagram is probably the ability to share their work with a wide enough audience and not just &quot;photo-snobs&quot;. For years Instagram has been more or less hostile towards photographers, who just want to use the app for photo sharing.<p>Flickr, in my opinion has a wide enough base of people, generally interested in photography, to mirror some of the positive effects of sharing to Instagram.<p>It was no doubt better in the past. But there is still a lot of people on the platform and an okay amount of interaction.<p>In my opinion there is still a potential for rewamping the platform and make it even better.

I recently uploaded my vacation photos to flickr, my first time using it. I have to say - very nice site &#x2F; app. I uploaded 900+ full resolution photos for free. Way better than insta or facebook, two apps I use so seldom that they are not even on my phone. I will likely pay for the pro version, not bc I need it, but bc I would be happy to support the company.

I have a collection of &gt;500k historic transport photographs which I have collected over the past 25 years. Some my own, some are old photographs dating back to 1900 or earlier. All are categorised &#x2F; tagged.<p>It concerns me what will happen to them when I am gone. At the moment I have a web site where they are hosted but I don&#x27;t expect my children to be able to admin that once I am no longer here.<p>I would be more than happy to donate it all to Flickr Commons.

My first startup was in the early 2000s [1]. It was a photo sharing service and we hadn&#x27;t even heard of Flickr though they were growing pretty quickly. They introduced some really cool features like tagging subjects in photos. Plus they had a really sweet animation of their logo while photos were loading over super slow connections.<p>Happy to see Flickr continue to find ways to live on.<p>Fun fact: Flickr started as a never ending web-based game where photos became a highly used feature. Similar to how Instagram came to be.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogger.googleblog.com&#x2F;2005&#x2F;04&#x2F;fotoflix.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogger.googleblog.com&#x2F;2005&#x2F;04&#x2F;fotoflix.html</a>

It wasn&#x27;t clear from the opening who wrote this announcement:<p>&gt; In December 2020, Ben MacAskill (President and COO of SmugMug + Flickr) asked me to return to the fold to figure out how to revitalize the Flickr Commons program.<p>So my brain decided that it was Stewart Butterfield, announcing his next move after leaving Slack. But, no, the &quot;me&quot; was Executive Director George Oates.[1]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.org&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;people&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.org&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;people&#x2F;</a>

On Safari macOS 13.0.1 with the usual AdBlocker, I cannot scroll past the splash. Something seems to be covering it.<p>Anyways, Flickr was a large part of my life when I started with Sony&#x27;s point-n-shoot digital camera in early 2000s. I started Flickr in 2004 with the gifted pro account for signing up and left it in 2015. The last-ish photo is of the one I laugh out aloud (alone in the London Tube) -- a marketing design trying to say that buying tickets were so easy -- but to hone in on what the picture meant, they had to write - (piece of cake).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;brajeshwar&#x2F;19704146340&#x2F;in&#x2F;datetaken-public&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;brajeshwar&#x2F;19704146340&#x2F;in&#x2F;date...</a><p>My account says 11.7 Million views, so people seem to be still looking around while I&#x27;m away.

I wonder if Flickr wants to create a corpus of CC content so that they can launch a competitor to unsplash. A separate non-profit entity to limit liability sounds like a smart move. Or maybe I&#x27;m reading a cynical motive when there isn&#x27;t one :)

not the first website where it happens but Firefox doesn&#x27;t let me scroll down, I only see &quot;Hello, World!&quot; ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯

Flickr is the best option for long-term photo storage. I gladly pay for my pro account. Good luck with the foundation!

This is about erecting a tombstone for a service that spent years and years in a hospital bed - not even well enough to cough up blood. It doesn&#x27;t make me excited. It makes me sad.<p>I gave up on Flickr this year.<p>Some time early next year I&#x27;ve had a Flickr Pro account for 20 years. For about 17-18 of those years, Flickr hasn&#x27;t made much of an effort, and when I think about it, I&#x27;m a bit cross with myself for having given them my money for so long with so little in return. I should have stopped giving them my money more than a decade ago. And so should everyone else so that whoever has been in charge over the years got an actual incentive to get off their asses and do something about the site. To at least develop a vision that is something other than &quot;let&#x27;s coast for a couple of decades&quot;.<p>I know there have been attempts to revive it, but they have, at best, been anemic and episodic.<p>For the first 10 years I stayed there in order to keep in contact with all the people I had gotten to know in the first couple of years. In the brief period when Flickr was a good place to meet people also interested in photography. People gradually disappeared over that decade. Flickr became a ghost-town. I remember browsing it now and then to see who was still around.<p>The next decade I stayed on because I didn&#x27;t want the photos I had uploaded to just vanish from the web. Which is a nonsense reason because I have all of the photos in my archive anyway, so I can just re-upload them somewhere else.<p>For me to come back to Flickr whoever owns it now has to demonstrate that they are serious about creating a photography site. It has to be fast, it has to be photography focused, it has to offer navigation&#x2F;discovery that isn&#x27;t slow and ugly and clumsy. And perhaps it has to also cater to the intersection between blogs and photography as a lot of the more interesting photography sites I follow now are really blogs.<p>The community that once existed is gone. It won&#x27;t come back. People have moved on. That doesn&#x27;t mean that there can&#x27;t be a new community. But it takes some doing.

I&#x27;d drifted away and went back a year ago and all of my information was gone-- photos, groups, everything. Nothing of mine is there any more. No reason to go back.

And a question for anyone involved: how does the .org relate to the .inc? Is the plan for Flickr to continue as a commercial enterprise?

&quot;We have begun building an intersectional scholarly group involved in researching history, library science, gender studies, critical race theory, digital humanities, and archival practice.&quot;<p>Archiving with a narrative, so to speak.