Don here, thanks so much for the vote of confidence. Big job ahead of us, but the community is the reason we did this. We want to invest, innovate and grow there. We'll be working hard. But first I have a lot of learning to do. Stay tuned.
Since you're here, may I voice a thing I really enjoyed about Flickr? Community and actual human communication.
Perhaps in the mobile era this isn't possible anymore since everyone is attention starved and tiny screens and keyboards aren't conducive to longform communication, but this was Flickr's strength.
You'd find a group where your photos were relevant and start conversations with strangers halfway around the world. The ability for groups to self-moderate is key because it kept groups on topic. I just poked around some communities I used to frequent like Hardcore Street Photography [0] and Guess Where SF [1], and they're surprisingly still habited.
Instead of trying to be another Instagram, I hope the future of Flickr will play to its strengths.
Back in 2006 or so when I last used Flickr, one of my biggest problems was spam and noise. One of the biggest annoyances was the constant comments from "award groups" that wanted you to join them, enticing you with some arbitrary "award", which consisted of some kind of gaudy badge.
To be honest, most of the Flickr groups seemed completely useless, full of HDR junk and asinine motivational stuff. Though I'm sure it's a bit like Reddit — the good communities are small and hidden.
Follower spam is another example of noise, and something Instagram is also rife with.
There are good dedicated groups with good curation. It takes a bit of lurking to find them. There are really good groups dedicated to specific genders of photography like Film only, or Documentary or Street Photography.
The good ones kept those gaudy things at arm's length. Some of these groups have a bit if an attitude at first, but as they get to know you and your dedication, they will warm up to you.
I like the idea of building a reputation system that accepts bots as first class citizens instead of imagining them as an inherent problem. Anyone who meaningfully contributes is good even if they are a bot, and anyone who doesn’t gets left behind. (Easier said than done but the approach to the problem is what’s fundamentally different.)
Reputation systems, if they try too hard, quickly reach a point where ambitious fakes are more successful at convincing the system than casual real users.
Case in point: Google visibility, if you are not Wikipedia no amount of quality content will get you above the link farms if you don't also follow the customary rites of pleasing the algorithm.
reddit (or some reddit users, it's hard to know) does this. There's a bot crawling around and whenever someone replies to a bot saying "good bot" or "bad bot" it updates a ranking.
Bots can definitely contribute meaningfully in many ways. Mostly through organization (suggesting labels & other metadata, album creation, etc), spam filtering & rule enforcement (like reddit's automoderator), and even automatic editing (like some of the stuff Google Photos offers, like rotation suggestions and various automatic filters).
Custom moderator automation would be a very valuable tool, bots are terrible at beating bespoke solutions. Is there some open source Amazon lambda clone that community platforms could easily make available to their power users? Funneling automaton onto a platform runtime could be extremely helpful in distinguishing between good and bad automation.
Awesome. In retrospect, apologies if my initial post was glaringly obvious. I think many of us here are nostalgic for a revival of Flickr and a community outside Facebook & Reddit.
Don— I was a paying customer too. Then Flickr changed their login, forcing me to get a yahoo account, which I then lost over time. So for years now, my account, and all the photos of my 1-3yo kid are buried and locked behind the “you need (login) and pay premium access to see all your photos”. All because that stupid yahoo login integration. Unrecoverable.
I will move heaven and earth to solve this for you. We're moving off of Yahoo Auth as soon as we can, but can likely fix before that (which will take awhile). Raising this up the flag pole.
Yeah I'm stuck in Yahoo purgatory too. I have a Flickr account pointing at a valid email address, and an existing desktop and mobile session for that Flickr account. However, I can't actually create a new session by logging in because Yahoo wants to do its 2FA thing with a defunct email address. I can't add a valid email address to the Yahoo account because I need to create a new session to do this. The defunct address itself is no longer associated with the Flickr account and Yahoo/Verizon support has formally abandoned account support.
I’m the same. Worst part is, I’m pretty sure I know the account. But eh aside from getting access to that account, I have all those photos, so less stress there :)
same. I tried connecting with yahoo support a few times and I can even see the public photos of one of my accounts but cannot login or download the originals, and they could not reconcile my yahoo login account with my flickr account.
I also allowed my Flickr pro-membership to lapse last month, simply because I couldn’t remember the Yahoo login that’d been forced on me a few years ago.
I received a reminder to my normal email address, but when I tried to reset the login, the secondary email was apparently something different and probably another arbitrary Yahoo address that I’d never ever used, so at that point I gave up trying to give them my money.
I’m hoping Flickr will get some serious love now. I echo the calls to make it image-focused and inclusive. I agree with others about getting rid of the stupid, self-appointed ‘awards’ spam, and about speeding-up the site generally. I doubt it needs all of that browser-crashing, CPU-intensive javascript.
Me too! I used to be a paying customer (in 2005-2006 I think) and then when the login procedure changed to Yahoo, I could never figure out how it worked. I just stopped using it.
I never lost any image and I'm now a happy Smugmug user/customer (ha!), so I don't really care about that anymore -- but yes, the login process is important! Many users would rather change shop than put up with crazy login procedures.
I've been a Pro user of Flickr since 2005 or so. I actually thought for the first time this year that I would cancel it. My number-one complaint is speed. It's so slow. As a professional infrastructure guy, it just kills me and I wished I could buy the company myself and make it fast again. I really hope you will invest in revitalizing this service because I really don't want to go.
My life--from young skier/mountaineer guy--to Army soldier--to dating a girl--marriage--kids--it's all documented there. I look at my old photos all the time but it's just so unbearably slow.
On it. We were a pre-launch customer of AWS, so we've been building both modern and at scale for quite some time. Super-talented team at Flickr, I can't wait to see what we can do together.
Since you're here and talking about community, can you say what your approach is going to be to the copious content on Flickr that violates SmugMug's content policy (but not Flickr's)?
Flickr's approach in the past [0] has allowed most things as long as a content filter is applied to keep it from kids and those who don't want to see it. SmugMug's approach [1] is to very broadly ban anything "indecent" in any context whatsoever (even private backups).
I contacted support and the story right now is that SmugMug policy will apply and any Flickr content that violates it is up for removal. Are you sticking to that? If so, why? It seems like a very destructive thing to do to the community as your first act after acquisition.
Flickr has its own Privacy Policy [0] and Terms of Service [1], separate and different from SmugMug's. I actually think this represents a good opportunity to revisit, and possibly update, what is and isn't allowed on SmugMug as well, something we haven't done in ages. We'll see, still learning. :)
Greetings Don. Always had a place in my heart for Flickr. Would love to see if thrive again. My gut sez there's a pretty big space between (the disposalness of) Instagram and the (heavy handiness of) 500px.
Maybe you agree. I guess we'll find out. I wish y'all the best. Fun and competition is a positive for all.
I'm in heavy learning mode so I don't have these answers yet. I wish I did.
The way I run SmugMug is pretty simple: We love our customers, we listen to them, we build great experiences for them based on that feedback, then we do it all over again. We're going to apply that same approach to Flickr.
Simply migrating them into AWS, and getting off of Yahoo Auth, and the variety of other urgent issues, will take a lot of time, effort, energy, etc. But we're also very excited to get to work enhancing the existing experiences and building new ones.
So please be patient with me as I learn, come up to speed, and tackle some of the big obstacles in front of us. It'll be worth it. :)
I've been a Flickr pro user since 2007, and I still think it's the only site and community that is truly dedicated to serious photography. I think the site languished at the advent of the ubiquity of mobile browsing (be it app or even mobile site), and suffered from certain trends that yielded a strange mix of infinite scrolling and wonky pagination (I still have trouble finding my own photos).
I'm hoping for the best, and excited for new blood.
In terms of communities where you can get the most qualified person on a topic to reply, I think Quora would also qualify, and to a limited extent, Twitter.
Quora really seemed nice until they started publish everything I did there. I also think they had a real name policy. (At least thats how I remember it.)
They might have fixed that now but I feel it would take quite some effort for them to make them feel safe again.
Reddit has a tendency to gain so much momentum that companies can't ignore people that are having problems like this. In that case, you often see a rep from the company log in and start triageing the situation.
Don here is clearly much more on top of the situation than that, but my point is that any big social site ends up seeing this with enough outrage.
I don’t think that facebook facilitates this well. Since you have to go out of your way to find a discussion there. And there is no “right now” feeling if you do find a relevant discussion. But here I just visited the home page of what I consider a general newsfeed and we’re talking to their new owners.
Hi Don, I have been a pro member of Flickr since 2008. I love the product and I'm very excited by this acquisition.
What I really would like to see in Flickr is a reliable upload application. When I'm back from a trip, I usually have a few gigabytes of photos. Regular applications can handle small (hundreds megabytes) batches but when you are talking about gigabytes they start crashing, or stopping in the middle, and cannot continue where they stopped reliably. I would like an application that uploads to Flickr, with retries, status, and with checksum verification on the client and in the server.
The same is true for download. Flickr handle well individual downloads and small batches of download. But when trying to download large albums they simple cannot handle it.
I have been writing my own applications and scripts to handle my photos on Flickr, so it's absolutely important to keep the current API open.
@silveira would any of your applications work on linux and if so would you be willing to share? I've been trying to download my Flickr photographs and so far only single image download works for me.
Hey Don, I have been on flickr since 2010 and I have been subscribed to Flickr's "Pro" service for several years.
I rely a lot on those statistics to generate more views and contacts
I would also like an expansion and more detailed analysis
Why can't I know WHICH picture was found through Google
(You don't, you say there were X finds through Google, but we can't see which picture)?
Why don't you show the Google Search URL?
Looking at SmugMug price plans you are MUCH more expensive than Flickr,
are you going to be raising PRO costs? And if you do, are you going to pull
the PR stunt of saying it is needed to "To Grow and Improve" and"We think the services offered are at the best price point, there is always free" ? Because Free is not a middle ground.
Because you acquired Flickr, you knew what was coming with it, IE, customers, there is no way to pass raising Tariffs without upsetting your New user base which has never asked for you and is tired of being thrown around from one company to another.and saying you have "no plans for the immediate future" it really does seem that you care more about your increased bourse instead of offering your clients an increased experience?
Are you going to include website hosting services to flickr users within the PRO price and go after 500px, or will you Keep the two Services very clear of each other for a different experience?
If you are keeping the two Services Separate, then aren't you really just here to collect a bigger check? If Yahoo / Verizon / Oath was not willing to spend money to upgrade our services and gain more users and you are, wouldn't this mean our subscription fees will increase?
Why should we remain here instead of going to 500px which offers a similar service to you but for much cheaper?
I had a quick look over their pricing plans, and they actually seem pretty fair to me. $48 per year to store all of your photos on the basic paid tier, and all the other tiers seemed aimed at people that are either enthusiasts or professionals, eg people who want to have their own domain.
The old adage of "you kind of get what you pay for" seems to apply.
I suspect that using your own domain for large volumes of photos still adds significant indirect time and energy cost of fiddling around with separate front end and mass storage backend. A bunch of time spent tweaking to keep full images and smaller versions organized and quick while not paying a premium for storage is a cost, and those hours have value.
Hi Don, great to hear. Paying Flickr customer for many years. One thing we lost recently was the ability to post a Tweet directly from the Flickr mobile app. I think the way Apple/Twitter interacts changed with an iOS upgrade.
I really don’t want to use another platform for storing my photos, even Twitter stream photos, and having Flickr, where I am in control was always my preferred choice.
Looking forward to keep using Flickr where the owners actually care.
I don't know yet, I'm still learning and coming up to speed. That being said, 1TB free is definitely a massive outlier on the Internet. We'll see.
SmugMug has offered unlimited storage for more than 15 years, so we know a lot about the space. I'm excited to see what we can do with and for the community.
I still have an account. If there was a reasonably priced, full featured Flickr I would resubscribe.
I have a smugmug account. Is there going to be a way to marry the two??? I have 11 years of photos on Flickr and would hate to have to move them (your sys people would hate it too I’m sure).
We know we don't want to merge the two. They're both super valuable, offer two different & great experiences, etc.
But logically, it makes sense that connecting them somehow makes a lot of sense. SmugMug has consumed the Flickr API for awhile, so some of the plumbing is already in place.
Stay tuned while we learn from our customers what they'd like and then build it. My hunch is better connectivity between the two services is going to be high on the list, but I'm going to let our customers drive that decision.
Hi Don, been paying for Flickr and looking lustfully at SmugMug for a long time, user back when Game Neverending was still mixed in. Bought accounts for all my family too. Looking forward to work.
This is the very best thing that could have happened to Flickr. The only other long term option would have been a mausoleum at archive.org or Archive Team.
Hi Don, I hope you are able to see my post, I think I became a bit invisible here, but I just want to take the opportunity to thank you for all those ZFS filer reviews, back in the day. This had a profound utility for us, which I will date to mention, now shuttered fifteen years ago due to the sudden death of my co-founder and best friend, we were so struck by what you guys were doing that we spent ten man years on a competitor... Ahm, no, no we didn't actually intend to compete, that would have been unable to pass my late co-founder's stringent "is it any good?" test, where I had to convince him as nauseam we had no negative motivation..but we thought we saw a higher end need for photo hosting, in the advertising world, where we saw that a readily available search and lightbox app, like you see at Corbis, or Getty, plus of course actually reliable storage, would be in immediate demand from photographers who liaise with ADs, everywhere. We had nifty features like rendering photos for the display capability, and were planning to hook up deals where the AD could subscribe to get so many 10 by 8 or larger proofs bikes to them, potentially from the nearest photographer who upheld a minimum process standard. This had ambition to take on digital advertising delivery. We thought smugmug was the game changer able to bring credibility to our dream of expanding access to lucrative agency work, to normal photographers. So we set about making the tools... even the dot com is long lost during my life's upheavals that followed from personal loss in large part, I grew up knowing my co-founder, but I think we've still got the unused Twitter handle. It was to be called PhotoAlta. Or PA (short for Photo Agency, which we thought was cute) . This is still a dream about opening the industry in ways that can make advertising affordable to small businesses, which is simply not at all the case now. In 03/04/05, we didn't see the hockey stick of the cloud, not at all clearly anyhow, but we knew that rather than bike proofs about, we'd rather provide on demand runtimes of proofing software, fronted by preconfiguration and parameter checks for avoiding waste. There's a realm of incredibly expensive software loosely categorised as pre press, that we desperately wanted to democratize. This expense was the hurdle to starting out business almost a decade earlier, and I've never been far from my work for opening the advertising industry economy, so random as this is, shame faced and also humbly if you are at all interested in what I'm on about here, I'd simply be delighted to pass on, unreservedly, to where it may do some good.
