Gather round, children, and I shall tell you of a bygone era. An era before smartphones and instagram, when photography was done with cameras, and posted in a magical kingdom called Flickr.
Those of you who did any kind of photography in the first decade of this millenium probably remember Flickr. In its heyday, Flickr had millions of users and tens of thousands of active groups. It was a platform for photographers to get together, share their work, have discussions, and just hang out. It was awesome.
Flickr was bought out by Yahoo. An overly complicated merging process that required Flickr users to have a Yahoo mail account alienated many of their users. In 2013, Yahoo announced that every Flickr account (even unpaid ones) would be given a free terabyte of online storage for their photos. Remember, in those days, most people still measured in gigabytes. This was an unprecedented move.
Then came the dark days. Very quickly, Flickr became a dumping ground for automatic smartphone photo backups, old archived snapshots that were sitting on forgotten hard drives, and, confusingly, a quantity of Second Life screenshots that far exceeded reason or basic decency. Instagram became the go-to place for the hip youngsters to post their picture-blogs and food selfies with their newfangled iTelephones.
To Yahoo’s surprise and nobody else’s, maintaining thousands upon thousands of terabytes of cloud storage for people who weren’t paying a dime for it was an unsustainable business practice. Flickr was among the hardest hit of Yahoo’s business holdings as the company started to collapse. By this time, Flickr was a ghost town. Petabytes of pictures slept dormant on old servers, far outnumbering the handful of brave and hardy souls who still clung to the few active groups still running.Eventually SmugMug bought Flickr from Verizon (who by this point had bought out both Yahoo and AOL, merging them into an unholy abomination of obsolescence called Verizon Media). The free terabyte was cancelled and a deadline given for people to get their photos backed up somewhere before the servers were purged and free accounts cut down to 1000 photos. Freeloaders across all of Reddit raged through their keyboards against this terrible injustice.And a few good men and women remembered the Flickr of days past and renewed their pro subscriptions, hoping to see Flickr propelled into a new gilded era of prosperity and joy.
In all seriousness, I am a Flickr Pro subscriber and would love to see the platform return to something more akin to how it looked in 2009. I haven’t found a better platform for actually being among other photographers. Instagram is better if you’re trying to reach a larger audience, and 500px is popular if you want to pretend to be Stefan Sonnenfeld. But even in its less-than ideal current state, at the time of writing in early 2020, I’m trying to remain optimistic. SmugMug seems to be good stewards of Flickr, or at least they’re a good company that cares about Flickr being successful as near as I can tell.
That said, the CEO of SmugMug sent out a letter not long ago basically asking for more people to subscribe, because Flickr is still hemorrhaging money and not on course to stay around for a whole lot longer at this rate.So when you read this, if Flickr is still around and we’re not all just biological batteries living in a simulation and powering our robot overlords, consider heading over there and signing up for a pro account. The world is a better place with Flickr in it.
Like Flickr? Hate Flickr? Offended by my jab at 500px? Let’s talk about it in the comments. Bring your A game.