Not sure how many here might use a service like Flickr but they recently published a blog post detailing some changes they have coming (conveniently it was published on St. Patricks day…).
Looks like they will require a “Pro” account to share “NSFW” type images.
…share restricted and moderate content will be reserved for Flickr Pro members .
They are also limiting non-public photos to just 50 for free accounts:
…for free accounts, photos over the 50 non-public photo limit oranymoderate or restricted photos will be at risk of deletion.
(I’m still paying for a “Pro” account but I honestly haven’t used the site very much at all in the past couple of years - considering dropping my account there in the future.)
For anyone interested, my Flickr account is here.
Flickr is as dead as a doornail. I left last year after the outrageous price hike. I don’t take to blackmail. Have my own hosted server now for less money than a year’s Flickr Pro.
Flickr’s problem has always been the dual nature of the service. It’s both a photo hosting (and backup) service and a platform for photography communities. As a hosting service it may very well be dead. There are however many talented photographers and communities hosted on Flickr.com.
Instagram may have a vibrant community of photographers, but technically it’s clearly geared towards a general public rather than photographers. Photographers adopting it was a matter of stretching the service beyond its intended use. Thumbnails are cropped, images as low res, computer uploads are not allowed and it’s polluted with advertising. The list goes on…
What I’d really like to see is an alternative to Flickr in the fediverse. We have an Instagram clone called Pixelfed, but sadly it copied most of Instagram’s flaws and limitations.
Indeed, it was the “groups” that first really drew me in and is the strongest feature of the platform (when coupled with hq images). A Flickr alt would be great, even if it’s not federated necessarily. I’d love to sit down and wire up a social layer over peoples own hosting also (ah, lack of time is so frustrating).
I used to use Flickr to share photos of concerts or parties with interested parties, that is the musicians or the people on the party.
Since Flickr decided to insert ads between my photos, I stopped using the service.
I don’t want to pay for a Pro account as I don’t use Flickr anymore (and I don’t have any porn to share neither… )
Good thing though was the ability to search for photos taken with a specific lens, to give an idea how it performed in different situations / apertures etc.
I’m kind of in the same boat, I use Flickr sparingly despite paying for the Pro account. Mostly because SmugMug seems like kinda OK people and I want something besides Meta and Instagram to succeed in this space. It’s too bad I can’t call it a charitable contribution for tax reasons. I had a Pro account for a few years back in the mid-00s and let it expire during the Yahoo/Verizon ownership time.
Instagram is to photography what fast food is to nutrition, it’s adjacent to it and not really directly related. It’s more social media and marketing than a place to show photography. Flickr really missed the boat on mobile and I think it continues to hurt their business. SmugMug and SquareSpace are probably more utilitarian for professionals and everyone else uses Instagram, TikTok or something else mobile focused. That leaves Flickr more in this weird no man’s land for hobbyists, except it’s got next to no reach for discoverability. Truly if you manage to tickle Meta or Google’s algorithms correctly they can really get your work in front of eyeballs like no one else. As you said the killer feature is the groups and community but those are dying on the vine. I looked at a number I’m in recently and most were inactive.
Of course as phones continue to become general purpose devices for authoring, editing and consuming content this will only get worse. I work with a lot of early 20-somethings at a university and none of them have heard of Flickr. Last batch of kids that did graduated in 2014 or 2015.
I’m not that old yet but I still can’t get my head around why people want to consume so much on a phone myself but we’re seeing more and more kids come in with a flagship smartphone and a Chromebook. A few with iPads but the Chromebooks seems more popular. The vast majority still have some kind of general purpose laptop but I’m seeing more and more forging one for a couple of appliances like that.
I’ve been hosting my own Piwigio gallery for years and before that Gallery 2.x, I looked into setting up a PixelFed instance but the last time I looked it was more of a moving target and not even close to reasonably stable. Whatever happened to MediaGoblin? That still around?
To elaborate on an earlier throw-away comment of mine, I’d like to federate the discoverability and communication aspects of photography but possibly leverage a users own website in some way.
Sort of how we do commenting at sites through discourse here. Where the content is hosted in a users own infrastructure but we provide engagement for a social layer through a federated or F/OSS solution.
Just thinking out loud, we could theoretically wire up comments or discussion on your Piwigio gallery that you host yourself. This would provide instant low-barrier engagement from the community members here and display it on your own site. I’m not sure how messy it would get managing the system on this end (my guess is very messy) but it’s technically feasible.
I suppose it’s also possible to do the same with another social platform if someone wanted to (the Strobist, David Hobby, for instance migrated to Twitter for commenting and engagement with his audience long ago).
If there was an easy way to manage something like this I’d be happy to provide it as a service to users here. (/me runs off before @darix comes kicking my butt…)
The comment chain would be weird without the actual photo being federated too. Take a look at photog.social, it runs mastodon, but they’ve done some customization to make image display better than the default mastodon deployment.
realistically all anyone needs to do is make a phone app that hooks into the API, and any mastodon or pleroma (which shares a lot of the API) will work. And the app can be exactly what you want to make. I can’t believe that isn’t what pixelfed is honestly; that project went in a weird direction.
And yeah the only thing I use flickr for was checking lens/camera images
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