Flickr Blog

Thank you so much for being a customer! I would love to help track this down and fix it, especially since I'm writing the new photo & video services. :) I will add this to my list. http://blog.flickr.net/en/2018/10/31/putting-your-best-photo-forward-f…

SmugMug is great but one of your comparison points just changed – Flickr just announced that Pro members will not see ads: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/07/23/hey-there-flickr-pro-nice-to-see-…

Love Flickr due to this. See this: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2011/05/13/at-flickr-your-photos-are-always-… Here they have explained how Y! can't use your photos for anything else except for the purpose the content was made available. Additionally, users have the option to make content licensable if they want to using Getty.

You imply Flickr's gotten no love from Yahoo!, but that's not true at all. Just last year they completely revemped one of the most important pages on their site: The photo page - http://blog.flickr.net/en/2010/06/23/a-new-photo-experience-your-photo… And they've made lots of improvements all over the site over the years. Flickr is one of the remaining products at Yahoo! that's gotten any serious love lately.

I think you're missing the point. Flickr has a grand total of somewhere over 5 billion photos. [1] Facebook adds four billion photos to its collection every month. [2] I agree that many of the best photos will be reshared elsewhere, for now, but think ahead a little: - Facebook could just improve their photo hosting just a bit -- or add a for-pay option to do so -- and then eliminate any other photo hosting site's reason for existing. - If you think about all the photos ever taken, artistic photography has always been a tiny, tiny niche market. Photos have always been about remembering and sharing, not art. And this is true of Flickr just as much as Facebook. Nowadays this extends to recording our lives practically minute by minute. The metadata associated with this is invaluable -- yes, ad targeting is part of it, but the sheer documentary volume is also important for a search company like Google, even if we limit ourselves to what EXIF can tell us. [1] http://blog.flickr.net/en/2010/09/19/5000000000/ [2] http://www.quora.com/How-many-photos-are-uploaded-to-Facebook-each-day…

Firstly anyone commenting on this post should also take a look at the current article on "HelpSpot’s First 6 Months of Sales" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199688 to get an idea of real numbers. "Replicating that experience on-line is difficult. Tipjoy is notably lacking in that regard. The main page is made up of a bunch of (dry) statistics. Hello, this isn’t Microsoft Excel! What are they trying to sell—business analytics?? Where’s the sidebar advertising how your Tipjoy data can be added to your Facebook/Myspace site? Where’s the banner that says “Show your girlfriend you really like her latest Facebook post?”... it must market itself as a social service. It must integrate into life, or life will continue to pass by outside of it. ..." Spot on comment. Require tools, samples and blog articles to do this. Make this task, easier than the best examples you find. "... Lesson: To succeed in Web 2.0 your site can not be an optional layer added to people’s lives. It must be inserted directly into the lives of the consumer ..." The author gets to what I think is a problem for most web businesses. "... And one last thing. No credit cards? Hey dudes, it’s 2008, Web 2.0. Instead of “Coming Soon” it should say “transaction charge”. Leave the choice to the consumer. ..." Author doesn't know what he's talking about here. Anything to do with money, transactions requires cash and likely regulation. One startup I worked for had to fork over $USD250K and deal with unsavoury…

Apple will not drop their plans. Google and Facebook are already doing this. Be happy at least Apple’s implementation happens client side and therefore can preserve end to end encryption. https://transparencyreport.google.com/child-sexual-abuse-material/repo… https://www.facebook.com/safety/onlinechildprotection https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna https://blog.flickr.net/en/2021/04/16/keeping-flickr-and-children-safe… Most companies dealing with photos have had this in place for almost a decade now. The FUD and slippery slope arguments are getting old.

Here's the blog post on this: https://blog.flickr.net/2018/11/01/changing-flickr-free-accounts-1000-… At first glance it seemed like a way to bring in more money, but the points they bring up actually seem fairly reasonable. The rough tl;dr is: 1. Giving a free terabyte to every user brought in lower-quality content as people came just for free storage, hurting Flickr's mission of being a site for quality content by photographers / artists 2. Subscriptions help them make money from the product instead of the users (I don't really buy this one, they don't have any reason to stop selling user data just because of this change) 3. They want to remind people that file storage costs them a fair chunk of money to keep running, and it's not something that's magically free

Focus on the pro market might be what is required to bring the service in discussion. Community of pro-photographers that uses the service to showcase their portfolio might be what they are going after. If 97% of free accounts have less than 1000 photos as they claim [1], it might be a good cutoff to set. Just wonder on two fronts, will they continue to sell ads? And will it continue to remain a Yahoo property (given they would not need a Yahoo id to login). [1]: https://blog.flickr.net/en/2018/11/01/changing-flickr-free-accounts-10…

> Looking at Flickr, it looks like the CC-licensed collection is about 100x larger than the PD-licensed collection That's likely because CC-licensing has been available on Flickr since 2008 [0] and they only recently started offering the Public Domain license as an option in 2015 [1]. It's good to see them finally offer more license types but they are so late to the game that many people like me just self-published or posted to Wikimedia Commons under the PD license instead, for all those years. I'm sure my images get fewer views than they would on Flickr but I can't be bothered to switch now. [0] https://www.flickr.com/commons [1] http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/03/30/flickr-now-offers-public-domain-a…

It's rivalled by http://blog.flickr.net/en/2013/12/16/welcome-the-british-library-to-th… And the same argument applies - why flickr? Or at least, why only flickr? Executives not willing to give up control is the answer. It's difficult for people who generally make a living from renting access to the public to imagine releasing something in a way that they couldn't revoke later. It's a major break from that possessive thinking to even release the stuff to a third party rather than commission some monstrous UI for their own site. If you want it in the public domain, give it to archive.org or make torrents. The public will do the uploading to youtube and flickr.

It doesn't have to be legally binding. The damage it can do to a reputation is deterrent enough. And it's not difficult to see how adopting it can have benefits: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2011/05/13/at-flickr-your-photos-are-always-… A lot of people are abandoning Instagram not because of the ToS per se, but because they were reminded that it is now owned by Facebook. And Facebook's reputation is horrible. Look at what Tumblr are doing by posting their policies on GitHub, which lets everyone see the diffs: https://github.com/tumblr/policy. Goodwill doesn't have to be legally tethered. But it can be.

A week ago Flickr announced that they’d be moving away from Picnik: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2012/01/13/start-the-new-year-fresh/

I believe this is now the default for all Explored photo pages. And below all individual photos there is now a message with the option to 'Darken this Photo': "Many websites today are engaging in an awareness campaign about two pieces of pending U.S. anti-piracy legislation -- SOPA (The Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (The Protect IP Act). If you would like to join Internet users around the world in this campaign, you may choose to symbolically darken Flickr photos (yours or others), depleting the web of rich content and letting others know about the potentially harmful impact of these bills. For more information see http://blog.flickr.net/.

"Update 9:27am January 18, 2012: We removed the 10 limit, you can darken to your dark heart’s dark desire." http://blog.flickr.net/en/2012/01/18/pipa-sopa/

Here is an example[1], but it seems the official Flickr account has enforced all their photos to be darkened. EDIT: The Flickr blog post[2] explaining how it can be enabled states: "Flickr is letting members darken their photos — or the photos of others — for a 24-hour period" So anyone can go to the white house photostream, and darken their photos. Looks like the white house will be protesting against SOPA whether they intended to or not! [1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/6599548523/in/photostream [2] http://blog.flickr.net/en/2012/01/18/pipa-sopa/

Claim 1 is the primary part of the patent, and I don't see how it would apply to generic tagging. Flickr does have this same feature, but they only added it in October 2009. Before that they just had generic "notes" and I would guess they are not particularly happy with the patent. http://blog.flickr.net/en/2009/10/21/people-in-photos/

Just an update: the harpoons did fail, but the engineers were very concerned about marked fluctuations in the telemetry. There was a suggestion that the lander might actually be tumbling, but those fears seem to have been allayed by the fact that the oscillations seem to have stopped. The engineers will comb through the data over the coming hours, in anticipation of the next downlink, which should be around 4:30am CET (13th Nov). It seems like there might have been bit of a bounce, and the lander might have landed twice! So long as the downlink is available during the next pass, it seems like the lander has weathered the worst of the landing. Science data has been downlinked, so fingers crossed we'll get some nice images from the surface pretty soon! There's a nice shot of the lander on the way down released already [3]. Sources: [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30031531 [2] Personal communication from ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany [3] https://blog.flickr.net/en/2014/11/12/rosettas-philae-probe-has-succes…

Under Marissa Mayer's watch, Yahoo has been investing tremendous effort in refining the UX on their web/mobile properties like Yahoo Weather [1], Flickr [2], and Yahoo Sports [3]. Seems like they're giving people a reason to use their products, and then making a play to have an OAuth-level relationship with the users. Maybe they want visibility into how a user authorizes third-party apps (FB gets an awful lot of insight from FB connect!) or maybe they just want to solidify their user lock-in. Either way, I can't imagine they justified the engineering work for massive redesign on seemingly not-profitable properties like Weather/Flickr without having a solid long-term plan for how to capitalize on that. [1] http://www.engadget.com/2013/08/15/yahoo-weather-android-redesign/ [2] http://blog.flickr.net/en/2013/05/20/a-better-brighter-flickr/ [3] http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/03/yahoo-sports-gets-ios-7-redesign-awes…

Here's the message I posted on my Facebook page if you want to copy it to share with less technically aware friends: -- The largest coordinated online protest in the internet's history is going on today, with the goal of stopping legislation that threatens the internet as we know it. If you think the internet is pretty cool the way it is, take a few minutes to click some of these links or at least share this post with others. Good video explaining the bills, "SOPA" and "PIPA": http://vimeo.com/31100268 An open letter written by "83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers", strongly opposing these measures with excellent explanations: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against-… Some of the larger sites protesting today, with more details and easy ways to take action: https://www.google.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/ http://eugene.craigslist.org/ (all craigslist sites) http://www.reddit.com/ http://www.wired.com/ http://wordpress.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/ http://php.net/ http://www.rackspace.com/ http://oreilly.com/ http://boingboing.net/ http://xkcd.com/ http://blog.flickr.net/en http://www.gnu.org/ http://techcrunch.com/ http://imgur.com/ http://www.newgrounds.com/