Lifehacker has a great analysis of why Yahoo’s recent Flickr tweaking is a little but underhanded—paid users, who never had a storage limit in the first place, suddenly do, and there are ads now…
Briefly mentioned, but not fully explored, is the bigger issue: How many of us really care about the service Flickr offers these days? I used to use Flickr as a place to park photos so I could share them in a blog post or via a link. Now, I can snap the photo directly on my phone and share it from my camera roll, via email or blog or Facebook. I don’t need to park it anywhere first.
And I don’t think me and my inane little photos are the only ones headed down that path. I accompanied the Beloved this past long weekend on a visit to see the baby of his old work friend. The friend—let’s call him Bob—started out with the Beloved in an early municipal job, and while the Beloved has worked his way up through the ranks to achieve his current civil service IT management job, Bob has taken a different path: He contract-hopped, moving from here to there and back to here again in search of the next big coding thrill. He’s between contracts right now, and had a chat with the Beloved about where he’s headed next.
I only understood a fraction of their nerd talk. But here was the key part: After receiving an update from the Beloved on how life as a civil servant is treating him, Bob shook his head. “It’s all on phones, man,” he said with a sigh. “Your Web stuff, it’s fine, but everything now is on the phones.”
And it is. I’m almost ready to buy a new laptop, and I’m hoping I can hold out until the Christmas season so I can buy it on gift cards. But if I can’t, there’s nothing my iPad can’t do. Sure, some stuff looks a little nicer on a proper computer (and I do still need to have one to run my media libraries and the Air Video server I use to stream my workout videos, since there’s no TV in my workout space). But Web browsing? Online shopping? Image manipulation? There is an app for that!
Pre-iPad, I would have welcomed free space from Flickr. But now, it’s just a redundancy. Why park on image on a website so you can share it, when these days you can just share it without that extra step?
Because…many sites reference image URLs, and don’t store the images themselves on the page. You need to have a photo parked somewhere to reference it. All my posts on Blogger reference photos stored in Flickr. Photos I display on Ravelry (a social knitting site), are referenced. And so on.
I heard someone whine that Flickr is irrelevant because there’s DropBox. Well, free Dropbox is quite limited for storing lots of high-res photos. The idea that I should pay for more Dropbox space because it isn’t a fusty old service like Flickr is stupid.
Other arguments about Flickr include:
It’s sooooo old-fashioned…
It’s not hip…
It’s for old people….
Those are ridiculous reasons to shun a service. For example, AOL is considered email for grannies. I use it because AOL does not data-mine emails. In fact, they don’t read your mail without permission. Storage is unlimited, too. People who look askance at services because they aren’t social enough need to realize that some of us seek out services just because they aren’t social.
Yes, I love my iPads. I’ve switched over to using it for everything except page layout and complex photo enhancement. But I sure don’t want to tote it around and take photos with it!
I have a Flickr acct, but don’t use it for much. Never liked the interface once yahoo took it over, and I object having to sign in with my yahoo acct. I set that up for email groups (anyone remember those?). I still belong to a couple and I didn’t want it all connected. Everything is connected anymore, but if I’m going to connect everything I’d rather connect via (and I know some of you will be shocked when I say this), but I’d rather connect things through Google.
I have all my photos on my computer and/or backup drives. Otherwise it’s all someone else’s choice and I don’t want to lose my photo memories.
Yahoo took it over two days ago! Not enough time to dislike anything but beets. I don’t actually go to the Flicker site myself–I use an app on my iPad and another on my laptop to manage my photos-so I don’t even know what the new interface looks like and I guess I don’t care. I travel a lot, and I take zillions of pictures. Every night I set up my machine to upload the photos to Flickr. That way, if the camera or SD cards are “confiscated,” as happened in one third-world country, or the camera is stolen (happened to my daughter in Italy last week), my pictures are safe.
Everyone has a preference, of course. I was just responding back to the author, who takes photos with her phone and sends them around. Some of us do serious photography (I don’t actually own a cell phone at all), and I am happy that Flickr safeguards my photos when I am unable to do it. I have several hard drives full of photos…Flickr is easier and hopefully will never have a head crash.
Count me as another Flickr user who very much plans to keep on paying for it. Like one of the other commentators pointed out, it’s a great backup repository for your photos which also lets you browse them easily from anywhere. Flickr also has a great API that works with third-party services like WordPress – we are using it at work to publish galleries of photos on our website. It’s not just for sharing to Facebook.