![]() ![]() While annoying the community isn't a recommended tactic, Flickr's real problem started later that same year. In January 2007, Yahoo! announced that all Flickr users would have to associate their accounts with Yahoo! accounts, which required them to provide more personal information to keep using Flickr. In 2007, Flickr was ranked as the 19th-largest site on the web by Alexa. Compared to the $1 billion that Facebook paid for Instagram in 2012 (to the amazement of many), it now looks ridiculous.Īt first, it looked like Yahoo!'s resources would help Flickr become one of the largest sites on the web: in 2006, the upload limit was raised to 100MB per month for free accounts, and lifted altogether for Pro accounts. Yahoo! purchased Ludicorp in 2005, for a sum estimated to be around $25 million. albums), the ability to list another user as a friend (or "family" for selective sharing), and the ability to embed photos in a "weblog."įlickr had two account types: free accounts, limited to 20MB of uploads per month, and Pro accounts, with up to 2GB of monthly uploads for $25 per year. The image hosting service became an instant hit for its effective use of features that are considered obvious today, such as tags, favorites, comments, groups, sets (i.e. Flickr was considered a pioneer of the Web 2.0 era, alongside the likes of MySpace, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube, whose content was generated mostly by their users.įlickr was launched in 2004, just like Facebook, by Ludicorp, founded by the married couple, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. User participation was usually limited to comments on news stories and online forums. In 2004, the most popular sites on the web were Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and other sites that offered news stories and indexes of recommended websites. What could Yahoo!, the site's former owner, have done so poorly in the years in between? How could Instagram have taken the lead so quickly after its launch in 2010? Is Flickr headed toward a virtual grave, or is it still a compelling service for some people? A decade later, in 2018, Flickr was sold to the relatively unknown company SmugMug. There was no Instagram or Unsplash around, and essentially that's what Flickr could have become. ![]() Google's automatic uploading tool is still as free as can be.In 2007, Flickr was the most popular dedicated photo-sharing site on the web, and growing exponentially in terms of new images uploaded. ![]() And that's fine! Luckily for the rest of us, we can just head to. This move turns Flickr back into a niche product, a social network for photographers. But most people are just as well-served by Google Photos, or Facebook, or OneDrive, or Dropbox, or any of the other services that automatically back up your photos to the Internet (for free). And it kills the notion that Flickr can be a useful, simple, automatic way to keep all your photos backed up in one place.įlickr Pro is a good service, that for some subset of serious photographers is well worth the price. The move feels a bit like ransomware, Yahoo forcing people who've already bought into the idea of Flickr as a permanent backup to start paying for the privilege. That means there's no easy way to upload big batches of photos all at once, into the same place, unless you're a Pro member. Today's announcements really only include one change of consequence: The desktop Auto-Uploadr tool is now reserved only for Pro users. In the search for a few more people willing to fork over $35 a year to fund more purple offices, Yahoo has killed its photo service. But then, this morning, Flickr announced that once again its best tools will only be available to paying users. Flickr's search engine was good, the new universal Camera Roll interface was great, and Flickr suddenly seemed to have a chance as a permanent archive of all of our photos. Just shy of a year ago, Flickr started offering 1,000 gigs of free storage to every user, along with an automatic uploader tool that would help you take every photo from your computer, your external drives, and SD cards, and dump them into one place. Even as it updated its search and organizational tools, Google Photos came along and one-upped its every feature. It's the place for photos, the way Flickr was once the place for photos. For the photo-nerd crowd, 500px and SmugMug are just two of the many places you can talk about photos in a deep, constructive way. If you were a person who cared about taking, editing, and sharing photos, it was the best and most robust community of like-minded people on the Internet. Once upon a time, there was nothing like Flickr. ![]()
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