Flickr was the coolest thing Yahoo had when I worked there (Brickhouse was a close second).

I really loved all the places where they snuck in "Game Never Ending" in the product, because they didn't set out to make a photo sharing product, but steered hard into that.

Flickr was the only property which was allowed their own version of PHP and despite having PHP inside, every single URL said ".gne" (Game Never Ending). I worked for the PHP team and that was my only excuse to show up to work in the SF office instead of being stuck in Sunnyvale when visiting the US.

They had all the right bits of architecture built out - rest of Yahoo had great code (like vespa or the graph behind Yahoo 360), but everything was more complex than it should be.

Flickr had the simplest possible approach that worked and they tried it before building anything more complex - the image urls, the resize queues, the way albums were stored, machine-tags, gps co-ordinates.

I also took a lot of photos to put up on flickr, trying to get featured on the explore page up front - it was like getting published in a magazine.

Every presentation I made had CC images backed by flickr, it was a true commons to share and take.

And then Instagram happened.

This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme.

I was there pretty early. I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr that my Pro account upload quota was upgraded to 2GB monthly.

Made many friends via my photos, online and in-real-life. Many of my photos became pretty popular and picked (stolen a lot too) up by major newspapers/publications in India, USA, and even in Vietnam. Some even bought the original copy and rights. It was never my intention to sell my photos nor will that ever be but my guestimate is that I sold quite a lot (high single digit thousands of dollars).

I donated and gifted a lot of Pro accounts to people who asked, mostly students and thos who commented nicely on my blog. Many of my payments comes to Paypal and it got accumulated and there were no ways to get the money to India (for a very long time). So, I just used it to gift to others.

Before I stopped using it more than a decade ago. It had garnered over 10+ million views and my tenure with Flickr lasted almost a decade.

I’ve taken backups/takeout but do not have the heart to delete my account yet. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/

I still pay for Flickr Pro, for a couple of reasons: the API still works, and I basically use it as a DAM for my wife's website. She's a composer, and it's super handy to have her upload into a Flickr Album and pull back different image sizes for her catalog.

Secondly, it makes use of and exposes EXIF data. I really, really lament the Instagrammification of online photography, where the only aspect ration was 1:1, terrible resolution, no EXIF data, and certainly no easy way to link a photo to anything outside of Instagram. That EXIF data makes it so much easier to search photos - although it could do with some AI autotagging. Surely that's coming down the pike...

Lastly, it's like an internet time capsule. There are accounts that started in the early 2000s and haven't been touched since the 2010s, and you can still pull full resolution imagery from there. And there are people even more old fashioned (and probably even more old) than me, still uploading new photos and old slides.

It sucks that Yahoo didn't do anything with Instagram, but I'm glad it also managed to avoid completely destroying it.

I was a Flickr member for many years. It was the only photo sharing website that emphasized the art of photography and also felt like a real community where I actually made connections with and discovered like minded photographers. The focus was on the photography and it didn't play games to keep me locked into the platform (cough Instagram)

Nowadays, I have a locally hosted Immich instance. It's great as personal photo archive, but is missing the social features.

To be honest, with the advent of GenAI, I'm now reluctant to share my photos publicly because I don't like the feeling that my work will be slurped up for AI model training..

Hey, owner & CEO here. Reading this now, but AMA.

At the peak of its popularity, Flickr was an interesting glimpse of the coming age of algorithmic homogeneity. In the mid-2010s, most of their top photos looked basically the same: heavily shopped, oversaturated HDR landscapes.

I stopped using Flickr around the time they started flirting with bait-and-switch strategies - "we'll hide / delete your old photos unless you pay" - so maybe things have gotten better... although I see that artificially-looking landscapes still dominate their "trending" page (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags).

Anyway, my general takeaway is that things are more interesting on photo sites where engagement isn't driven primarily by a global popularity ranking. You just come across thought-provoking work more often.

I've been a pro member for many years, with about 35k photos uploaded. I am grateful that they have never chased the engagement bait. Some people like to complain about the Pro features but I found them to be absolutely fair and I wanna do everything I can to support this platform.

All of my photos are automatically synced to Flickr via the Auto uploader, and getting things from my camera to Flickr is as simple as transferring the data from the dslr to my phone, and the auto uploader takes care of the rest.

From there I can go through the photos, decide which ones I wanna make public, and organize them into my albums to share with others.

My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.

   <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/uname/1234/" title="My Title"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/1234/abcd.jpg" width="1024" height="768" alt="My Alt Text" /></a>

    [![My Alt Text!](live.staticflickr.com/1234/abcd.jpg "My Title")](www.flickr.com/photos/uname/1234)

Flickr has been mentioned in interviews by the founders of both Vimeo and YouTube as having been a direct inspiration on the creation of both of those sites. It got a lot of the design right the first time. Flickr and the projects that emerged out of the context it pioneered changed the world.

Lately I've been enjoying photography a lot but Flickr never clicked for me. Instagram nowadays is almost unusable for this as it prioritizes reels too much and 500px... I liked that one more than Flickr.

Right now, I'm using glass.photo and I actually quite like it. You have to pay, though, which is a high entrance barrier, but I feel the quality of what I see in the site is great, the platform works nicely and the community has been welcoming so far.

I yearn for a good site to share and comment photos which is a bit more open, though.

This is less a pro-Flickr than an anti-Insta but I absolutely refuse to sign up for the latter

Zuck purely bought it to murder competition in the crib

I'm not going to sign up for it just because he put a hard login wall ("look at how many users we have!")

He kills art, he kills organic reach, all his products turn into spam, 97 ads per real post

By the creator of Slack, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield.

To me, Flickr is the better Photo.net. Photo.net has been around since 1993 and apparently is still running, but it never was a site where you could just collect your own work and share them the way you wanted. It would be interesting to read about how Flickr succeeded against an older, established competitor.

Still use it. It's a treasure trove of photos from 2004 - 2015, and easy to search / filter.

It's a crying shame that instagram "won" the photo war, because it is straight up impossible to search / filter through.

What, no shade on photobucket?

Single handedly created a lot of issues for anyone maintaining old cars…

SmugMug is pretty great.

I was active there before 2010. I liked taking photos, good gear, interesting perspectives, and Flickr was a great way to explore the work of other like-minded folks, usually with much better photos than mine.

The only thing I disliked was the mandatory Yahoo email, that I had no other use. I knew I would eventually lock myself out, and I did. I forgot about Flickr.

Until about a year ago when I went back out of nostalgia, tried to recover my access, and succeeded! Big thanks and kudos to the team allowing that with other email! Unfortunately, I am not that active anymore; my life has changed, and I no longer have enough time and energy for good photos. Still, will be back from time to time.

I think I like about Flickr is the add a note feature. Not sure if other platforms has any similar feature but I find it helpful for me to add note on part on the photo for future reference such as place or anything peculiar.

I considered Flickr as a place for my photography portfolio, but I can't recommend it to anyone. Try sharing a portfolio link with someone who doesn't have an account there. It'll open with these nasty pop-ups, even if you have the paid version.

So I looked for a good alternative and found the paid https://glass.photo/ -- almost no one uses it, the service probably won't survive the next 5-10 years, but at least the UI/UX is done with some thought

Great?

I remember that time I reported someone for reposting my images.

Flickr's response was deleting my profile, all of my photos, and not responding to any of my attempts to contact them.

On the upside, it was a good lesson to not trust service providers.

They introduced a limit to 1000 photos, I deleted almost everything, then somehow they didn’t go through with the limitation, only warning me about nearing 1000 photos. Anyone knows what exactly happened?

If you want to see the future of photo platforms like Flickr, you should download the cooliris.swf file from here:

https://github.com/cooliris/embed-wall

If you're on MacOS, you can run the file with this software:

https://ruffle.rs

This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities. In ten or so years, everybody will use it for multimedia.

Instagram didn’t kill Flickr by being better for photographers, but by being better at distribution.

In the last few years I've tried multiple photo hosting options. 500px, Flickr, Unsplash.

In the end, I just built my own photo blog on Hugo with SveltiaCMS (thanks Claude). I don't care much about the social part per se, just want a place to host my photo journeys.

@onethumb Is it possible that Flickr will be integrated into SmugMug eventually or it will remain as its own branch? I know it is difficult to say for sure but some direction for near future?

No mention of Picasa?

I signed up in 2004. It was part of a wave of hot new platforms, all of which it seems Yahoo! was acquiring (except YouTube, which went to Google). We used it at work as well (political consultancy) to host photos for applications, making great use of their excellent API. The idea of getting your photos back out again via a sane API with multiple sizes including thumbnails handled for you was pretty wild.

> This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme.

Elrond?

Love those old photos of Macromedia - my wife worked in the same building at the time and they bring back a lot of nice memories :)

If you didn't pay recently, they deleted most of your photos anyway.

They deleted all but the newest 100 or so for the free accounts

No comment on your photos, but I think this abomination of a cookie selection banner is all on needs to see to decide on the current state of Flickr. It's literally several pages long!

EXIF data enabled some pretty cool things, like PhotoSynth [1]. This stuff looks futuristic even now, ~20 years later, basically what the Metaverse could/should have been.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...

It's insane that a platform like Instagram that is focused on photo sharing compresses and downsizes photos so much.

Yeah the time capsule thing is a big part of its value to me. I will never forget how disappointed I was when the "Macintosh" group disappeared. I think at some point I actually chatted with someone who worked at Flickr and explained that the group owner simply closed it at some point (can't remember 100%). It had so many photos going back to basically the earliest days of Flickr, of all kinds of awesome photos of Mac computers of all eras, not only new digital photos but tons of stuff people posted from prior decades. The other Mac/Apple-related groups were not as comprehensive. That was good while it lasted, at least. I wish there was some way to re-open the group :\

Just finished reading. Glad they captured what we're doing - photography & community - and what we're not - algorithmic feeds & privacy violations.

We have lots of work to do, and I think most of the criticisms are fair and on our road map. Small team, working hard, listening to customers. Like we've been doing for 24 years. (We're bootstrapped and privately owned, never taken VC).

AMA.

I think I asked Nathan B all of my important Flickr-post-your-aquistion questions at a 7CTOs event way back in 2019, but that was a lifetime ago. Do you make enough money off my Flickr Pro subscription to keep it going indefinitely? I'd rather pay you then funnel more cash to AWS or Google for cloud backups, but I'm not a professional photographer, so the actual SmugMug products aren't valuable for me and there's always the slight dread that you kill Flickr because it's a blip of a side hustle to the main business.

Hey, long-time Flickr user who migrated to Google Photos for a somewhat specific use case. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/perardi)

I do a lot of event photography as a creative outlet. I want my friends to be able to download individual photos and photo albums easily. As an example, I just photographed a fundraiser for my rugby team last week, and I made all my shots available in a Google Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PfwHpEJejywBRiZp7

And while that works, I don’t necessarily love feeding all my creative content into the Google machine. I would rather support a diverse photography ecosystem.

Have you explored making downloading individual photos and albums a prominent feature? Mind you, I realize I am weird photographer who does this stuff for free, and I don’t care about attribution or watermarks. I just want my friends to be able to get their photos easily.

FYI - I loved reading your blog posts ~20 years ago about how you were building your server infrastructure (hardware, dedicated, onprem, etc).

If any more recent post exist on similar topics, I’d be fascinated to read more.

https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/

whats the current censorship level?

I seem to recall a buyout and some kind of 'certain things are no longer allowed' changes.

Similar thing happened with tumblr, then they semi-reversed a little but not a lot I think.

Stopped using both because losing content and accounts with no customer support is the internet way apparently.

Hello. I just logged in for the first time in a while and it asked me to verify my age, despite the fact that my Flickr account is 22 years old. I've been paying for Flickr Pro as long as that has been possible, if I remember correctly, my Flickr user number was ~620. Surely, with an account that's 22 years old you don't need to hand my personal information to Peter Thiel?

To some degree I only still pay for it out of nostalgia for what it was. I stopped using it when it started trying to upload my entire camera roll every time I opened the mobile app - Flickr was never about storing all your photos on someone else's server, it was about curation and community. It somewhat lost that as phone photography got more popular, and instead of empowering users to do that directly on their phone, it presented itself as a mere backup utility. The app seems to be entirely non-functional now, no content loads at all for me. Flickr's failure to move with the rise mobile photography feels like its biggest misstep - age verification for an account that is 22 years old though might actually convince me to stop paying. I'm not using it, the mobile app is broken, and now it wants to hand my PII to a third party.

Have you considered offering free storage for freely licensed (cc-by & cc-by-sa) works?

I want to share my photos under a free license, but the one thing that always put me off Flickr was that I would have to pay an indefinite subscription to contribute to the commons.

Hey, it's Saturday night and I'm on Hacker News woot woot.

I work on climate technology (sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky), and I have a side quest to create a "Freedom to Breathe" mural in Manhattan before the upcoming New York Climate Week. Might be up your alley knowing artists and photographers. How interested are you in working together on making a mural?