Speaking from the perspective of the photography-enthusiast category, I've been coming to the conclusion that Google+ may become the next Flickr.
It has first-class communications features that Flickr has always sorely needed. Commenting isn't a tiny box at the bottom with awful pagination, you can upvote posts as well as comments, and it has group sharing capabilities well beyond "add to pool".
The photo upload process is also far superior to Facebook, and the photo viewing experience is superior also when it comes to high-resolution, high-quality compression that many photographers desire. Facebook butchers uploads with awful compression artifacts.
I've been seeing a lot of amateur and professional photographers flock towards G+ - doubly so since the launch of Communities.
Personally, I like using Google+ to talk photography a hell of a lot more than I like to on Flickr. That might be telling.
I wanted to say the same thing. Google+ has a lot of going for it when it comes to photography.
Skipping over the UI, which is really, really good for photography consumption (have you seen the iPad app? it's beautiful), Google+ has one freakishly big advantage when comparing it with Facebook or Flickr that goes unmentioned:
Google Drive - because IMHO, online backup and carrying your huge collection wherever you go, on whatever device, are far more valuable for photographers than sharing.
I almost agreed... then I moved from Windows to Ubuntu and the lack of Picasa blew all value clean out of the water as the basic syncing, permissioning and tagging became unnecessarily difficult.
It(g+) may not not become next Flickr. Mostly because G+ is everything or at least trying to be so and Flickr was(and is) mostly photos and photos only(I mean they added videos but let's not talk about that).
I often want a photo to illustrate a blog post, but I want one that I can use legally, e.g. public domain or under a Creative Commons Attribution-Only (CC-BY) license. Flickr provides an easy way to search for CC-BY photos in their collections; I find it incredibly useful:
Likewise, in my experience searching for CC photo's on flickr is significantly better than searching for the same using google image search. Not so often you find google being outdone by anyone...
Not likely - the new app offers mobile posting, and that's about it. The Flickr site requires people to pay $25 a year to upload more than 200 photos, and regardless of what you think of premium models, there's intense competition. Flickr itself is stagnant. Years stagnant, we're talking. Features, API integration. I'm really, honestly unsure, even subscribed to their devblog and being a premium customer for 5+ years, what their dev staff are actually doing.
I loved Flickr. It's on life support. And the prognosis is not good.
I imagine they're working on scaling and bad content filtering mechanisms in the back end, and integrating deanonymizaton from 3rd parties, and a secure API for authorities as required by law. All of these wonderful features offer nothing for the customer but probably help them make money from what is otherwise freeloading traffic.
Anyone else who's trying to create a flikr clone should take these requirements into consideration when designing your architecture and calculating your TCO. Map reduce fleets needed for these kind of analyses after the fact is not cheap and you want to have that stuff hitting the ground so you can start working on new features right away. When flikr was made 5 years ago, these kind of features weren't really a consideration for someone with an old user-as-the-customer-model in mind. Stewart Butterfield a co-founder resigned in 2008, stating that he was an old tin man in a new age.
Paying flickr user here. Flickr is perfect and that's it's problem. I don't need social integration, I don't need filters, I don't need multi-platform sharing. I need an automatic resizer and reliable CDN and flickr is a remarkable both of those.
Flickr is not dead nor is it on life support, it's just not interesting. But just because something's not interesting doesn't mean it's not exceptionally useful. Flickr's search is best in show, it's CDN is always fast and reliable and API is comprehensive.
A massive user-base and obnoxious valuation don't make something important, sometimes just being useful, even if underutilized, is good enough.
edit: it also contains many amazing collections that are easily browsable, searchable, and aren't under threat of disappearing from the internet 'cos of a passing fad.
The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered. They aren't going to out engineer or out pace any smaller competitor.
Basically, the only thing they have is gone and is going to be very hard to get back. In Internet speak they abused their community by abandoning them for years.
By "they" I mean the bureaucracy I came to know so well while at Yahoo!. And no, Marissa Mayer can't save the day on this one.
Facebook won the casual social sharing of photos and 500px is winning on the "professional" side.
Disclaimer: I'm a founder of OpenPhoto. We're not fighting the same fight as Flickr though so I'm an external party on this specific topic.
Just because you have the institutional memory of Flickr during its fall from grace doesn't mean the rest of the internet, particularly the younger generation, does.
Instagram has proven that social networking around "artistic" photos has an audience. If Flickr can be the more professional, big-boy Instagram (maybe even with a website!), then I can see it attracting a new audience.
But what I'm saying is that it is more likely that someone else wins that race.
The only thing Flickr has going for it is their existing community who have largely abandoned it. They're not going acquire a "new" community better than their smaller competitors.
Case in point. It took them years to release mobile apps. Then a year to release a major update. That's millenniums on the Internet.
If you think Yahoo! can change that, well, you haven't worked there :).
I think Flickr still has the chance to rescue itself. There are still some vibrant communities. Say you want to learn/discuss wedding photography, or maybe you want to learn about portraiture photography, or staged photography, there are very active and content rich communities.
What flickr can do is expand on the tools they've provided those communities. Right now, there are a few sticking points:
-Comments --they're not sortable, they don't have a mechanism to up/down vote relevant irrelevant comments.
-Search --it's horrible. Searching for a comment/thread you kind of recall and want to find? Lost cause.
-Galleries --they need to improve this. If you want to curate and showcase a theme, whatever, it's very difficult to do, aside from creating side-groups.
-Accepting/curating photos into pools. They need to introduce 'AND' in addition to the 'OR' mechanism to allow images into pools which require admins to 'approve' images.
-A way to 'elect' admins by the members. Admins tend to tire after a few year and allow their groups to wither. The solution now is to go and create your own group. That loses lots of rich history (discussion threads). It would be nice to be able to 'vote' in new admins, in groups which elect to be set-up that way.
LSS, if they revamp some core functionality and improve the communication tools (and adding something akin to @messaging), they have an eager audience. Lots of the 'serious' users, actually do care about their communities and actually follow the managerial follies always hopeful that things will change for the better --sure some have left for FB, 500px. Some of those have found that FB incurs a cost -the cost of not being able to have aliases, privacy issues, etc.
> Facebook won the casual social sharing of photos and 500px is winning on the "professional" side.
There's probably room for a lot of different kinds of photo sharing apps. Even ones that the tech press or hackers don't care about. Shutterfly pulls in hundreds of millions dollars a year, mostly from paper products related to uploaded photos. Like photos for your kids' softball team.
Flickr can't be the next Flickr, because when Flickr was Flickr it was the only app of its kind. People really were doing a lot of different activities on the site; photos were the media object to organize it around. Back in 2005, it was Twitter, Facebook, LiveStream, Tumblr, YouTube, etc., all in one. Whatever Flickr is going forward, it will probably be more narrow and more deep. I'm not sure they can win as an all-things-to-all-people photos site.
The other thing Flickr has going for it is they're still the ONLY one out there that has decent support for metadata. I've tried Smugmug, I've tried OpenPhoto, I've tried Gallery (v2 and v3), and Flickr is still the only one that seems to understand concepts like (for instance) "the tag 'Joe Schmo' should not be displayed or (god forbid) SAVED as 'joeschmo'".
And nobody but Flickr has the (really, really great) Guest Pass feature, where you can share private photos with people WITHOUT forcing them to sign up for something.
There's even more features that Flickr is the only service to have. They're ahead in many areas but the speed at which they've been adding new features is significantly slower than others.
It's just a matter of time before other services replicate the features Flickr has today which are valuable. Remember, they've been around for 8 or so years. It takes time to get to where they are today. But 8 years from now, it won't be Flickr we're talking about.
"The only thing Flickr has going for it at the moment is its community; which has withered."
It's also got the inertia of it's existing userbase - each year my renewal comes up, and I think "Do I _really_ want to pay for this again?", then I think "But is it worth saving $25 but having to move all the photos I have up here, and deal with having links to them break?" and I just pay up again. One day, I suspect I'll start storing photos elsewhere, but I'll probably choose to not only export all my Flickr photos and re upload them to the new place, but also choose to keep paying Flickr for long enough that I don't care too much about all the forum and blog posts pout there embedding Flickr urls - that's quite likely to represent another 5 years of Flickr subscription, even if they don't offer me anything except continuing service of the photos/videos on their current URLs. (My Flickr stats show long-tail trickles of image views from forums I've not been on in 3 or 4 years, at least some of which I'd be sad if the people looking for that sort of specific information (in my case, a lot of repair and service information for late 1990's Ducati Monsters) ended up with a bunch of broken image links)
My subscription just expired and I can't decide what to do... Last year I gave them one more chance. I guess they have shipped something, although I use Android...
I've got an openphoto account. The friction I feel each subscription time is all the places out there on the internet that are linking to my Flickr pictures with the Flickr urls. It's worth ~$25/yr to not even consider going and finding all the places I've got pictures linked out of my Flickr account and working out how to update them (if it's even possible). I could very easily store all my own photos in S3, but I can't easily go back and update old urls, and hey - $25 isn't _that_ much…
This is true for me. Flickr was the first web service I paid for, and I still do. It really was a generational leap at the time. Photos were meant to be shared, and they nailed it. Tagging and tag clouds, folksonomy, embeddable badges - these were all fresh back then and they worked well. If only they would have added the ability to tag friends early on, I think it could have taken the place of some social networks.
I really do hope flickr becomes the next flickr. I keep putting my photos there, because I like to have them in one place. However, I do have to admit that sharing them on facebook creates much more interaction and fun.
I used to backup my photos on Flickr, but Flickr is awful for backups. You can't upload lengthy videos, you can't backup your raw files, retrieving your whole collection back from Flickr is extremely painful, etc...
So recently I'm switching to Google Drive for my backup needs.
I know a lot of people who also used flickr primarily as a backup solution. Sharing their photos with strangers on the Internet was always a secondary motivation.
This may, at least in part, explain flickr's gradual decline. In the age of cheap 3TB hard drives, 64GB SD cards, and cloud backup solutions, flickr seems a little old-hat.
I use it as a backup, and catalog. I still have my photos on my hard drive, but I know if it dies they'll be on flickr still. This was more important to me before I had dropbox.
Flickr also serves as a great cataloging tool. It's quicker for me to find a photo by tag on flickr than to find it locally.
Ehh... I disagree somewhat. 500px is another beast entirely, with its own (huge) set of problems. As an avid photographer myself I can't really get behind it.
To summarize a large argument: 500px has an extremely strong groupthink, leading to a very confined set of photos that its community prefers. It is much stronger than any other photo site I've come across, including Flickr.
Its notion of beauty is very firmly in the territory of tourist-kitsch, and the single-mindedness of its community prevents it from catering to, well, any photo enthusiasts who desire something different. Heavily processed long-exposure landscapes, extreme telephotos of animals/birds, and scantily-clad/naked beautiful women - those three topics alone dominate that site.
500px's photos lean towards high production values, it does not lead to either discourse about photography as a craft or deep sharing. Which is to say, it is unlikely to replace existing photography communities, nor is it likely to take the mainstream like Flickr, or Instagram. The community shuns serious photographers outside of its narrow niche, it also shuns casual amateur shutterbugs like mom and dad's point and shoot, and it shuns "artsy" lo-fi photos like Instagram. Breaking that community out of its self-constructed (and very, very small) box I think will be the 500px team's greatest challenge.
I agree with that. 500px is a bit elitist (although does have a lot of 'quality' photography in the mainstream sense). Flickr on the other hand is a lot more loose and if one knows how/what to search, there can be real gems and aspiring new artists to be discovered, alongside all the old masters.
The thing that drives me absolutely bonkers about 500px is that you can't disable the stupid right click blocking JavaScript.
If people want to use it, fine, give them the option (even though it doesn't prevent anyone determined to get a photo saved). But, for the love of everything, please don't force users to have it on. I was going to sign up (and pay) for 500px until I found out that you can't actually disable the right click blocking (see: http://support.500px.com/customer/portal/questions/475736-ri...).
Geez about time - not that I know whether Flickr is worth the investment, but as a heavy user of Flickr since pre-Yahoo, I'm glad it's making a comeback ... clear out those cobwebs!
>Could Flickr create a beautiful magazinelike iPad application that allows people to skim through high-resolution images on the service?
How does this Flickr app not already exist? I'm pretty sure a couple of 20yr old coders could make an app like this in a day or two if they had access to Flickr's data. The hard part isn't displaying images on a tablet, its having the high quality images in the first place.
IMO the challenge here is defining the right UX and brand. Not to say that it shouldn't be done, I'd much rather Flickr achieving this than Instagram (= Facebook) or any other current player in the market.
It has first-class communications features that Flickr has always sorely needed. Commenting isn't a tiny box at the bottom with awful pagination, you can upvote posts as well as comments, and it has group sharing capabilities well beyond "add to pool".
The photo upload process is also far superior to Facebook, and the photo viewing experience is superior also when it comes to high-resolution, high-quality compression that many photographers desire. Facebook butchers uploads with awful compression artifacts.
I've been seeing a lot of amateur and professional photographers flock towards G+ - doubly so since the launch of Communities.
Personally, I like using Google+ to talk photography a hell of a lot more than I like to on Flickr. That might be telling.