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Discussion (46 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It's been such a tragedy that we now have such good quality cameras, yet all the media we consume is incredibly downscaled and compressed to save money.
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.
I still have my account and old photos there. And because I licensed most of them as CC, a couple of them landed on Wikipedia because of that - felt nice.
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/
He made Bulkr, which was one of those tools that just works and super easy to use, in getting all of your photos offline from Flickr. I don't think it works anymore. His revenue and hits went crazy after Veronica Belmont talked about it.
https://brajeshwar.com/2011/bulkr-access-and-backup-your-fli...
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..
I cannot understand this mindset. People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages.
Enforcement is another things but photographers and artists have had ways to push back against illicit use of their work, notably by larger corporations. Licensing is an industry based on this protection alone.
The difference is that now, large corporations with plenty of money are able to just swallow other people’s work and pretend it’s “fair use” and derivative enough that they wash their hand of the fact that their models, that they charge lots of money for, would not be able to output anything they were not trained on. At least you could argue that a large image model would have a hard time creating a picture of a cat if it hadn’t been fed pictures of cats that belonged to other people than the company producing the model.
I don’t know if training on the world’s data without compensation is fair or not. There are valid arguments both ways, but as an individual, it should still be your choice whether you want to allow your work to be used in ways you do not agree with.
I think people at large expect at least recognition, and if possible, compensation, for their creations.
When a consumption system is built around providing neither, I don’t think we should be surprised that people feel slighted.
People, yes. The possibility of one person using a copyrighted work that I uploaded to the internet is very different in scope to that of a corporation with billions of dollars in funding using the same work to generate a product that automates the creation of similar such works.
Right? On the one hand there was the mystery of what might happen with your photos and on the other there is the plain, inescapable knowledge that they will be donated to like four dude’s tech companies to make money off of without acknowledgement or compensation. That’s basically the same thing
Please.
Do you call operating systems "malware enablers"?
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. But 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 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. How interested are you in working together on making a mural?
As I think the article captured pretty well, we could make a lot more money if we went the algorithmic-privacy-violating route, but we don't want to. So we aren't.
Since we never raised a round of funding, as long as the bills are getting paid, we can do what we want - build a company for the long-term based on a great photography community. So that's what we're doing. :)
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.
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.
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.
It would really be crazy if they did that, but they claimed that limiting the number of photos users could upload, instead of limiting the quality, somehow made it more like a social media platform.
Single handedly created a lot of issues for anyone maintaining old cars…
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.
Of course I also have my webpage to showcase my favourite pictures but I feel I'm more picky in that site than in, say, Glass and instagram, since I want to show 'the best' there :-)
>It's probably even more photographer-oriented
not even remotely serious? ridiculous
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
It was atrocious.