How is Flickr these days?

It's alive and well and membership is free but with a limit to numbers of uploads. A subscription allows unlimited uploads. I use it for the following reasons....

For archiving information and photographs on specific subjects.
Each photograph includes descriptions and links to further information.
Flickr is an excellent resource for information.
Viewers can zoom into a photograph to see detail.
Because of that, viewers can 'walk around' a photo, such as a church interior, providing the resolution is good enough.

My subjects are mainly churches, classic vehicles and steam locomotives from my part of the world. Other like-minded individuals do the same for their patch, particularly in relation to churches. Why do we do this? Because they'll probably be gone within 10 to 20 years due to lack of interest and / or intervention by progressives who'll want to ban anything old. So if we don't archive such things, all we'll have will be memories or blurred photos devoid of connection to time, place or subject.

I'm limited in the numbers of photos I can show because in my opinion, the description takes precedence over the photo, even though I try to take as much care as I can with the latter. However, I have noticed a few things over the three years I've been using Flickr......

A lot of comments are “Good capture”, “nice capture” and “nice shot”. A lot of this is down to 'groups' where members are obliged or even required to 'comment' on other members' photographs.

Interesting comments tend to be amongst users with a specific interest. For instance, discussion about vintage cars, steam locomotives, old buildings etc. Not so much about each photograph, more about the subject.

Resolution is limited. 60 mp perhaps? I posted a 100 mp picture once and the detail wasn't as sharp on Flickr as the original.

Difference in resolution across camera brands. You need to check this out yourself but I find it very interesting.

It's difficult to find a photograph using a search engine such as Google. You have to open Flickr and then search within that and remembering to sort ('relevant', 'date taken' picklist).

The 'user experience' isn't exactly intuitive or straightforward but once you remember how to do things, it's OK. When you upload photographs, messages like “milking butterflies” and “frobulating widgets” come up for a fraction of a second which partly alleviate the downsides.

ChiJeff5 said:

I started on Flickr about 15 years ago. Loved the community and platform at the time. I learned a lot in my early years by posting photos to critique groups. Things changed and I started spending more time on Instagram. Then the Flickr subscription model and pricing changed a few years ago and I stopped paying.

Now I'm getting tired of Instagram and thinking about going back to Flickr. What I miss most are the discussions and critique. Is there a lot in interaction on Flickr these days or is it just people dumping photos?

I'm not looking for cloud storage, just meaningful and interesting interaction with a wide variety of photographers at all skill levels.

Click to expand...

Flickr is live and well, depending on how you want to approach it. Best photographer site to be on for peeps who are mainly interested in photography and not attention fame seekers.

I would never ever use instabrag or facedork- horrid social media plain and simple.

-M

For a massive collection of photos meant to be photos, Flickr is it.

For discussion, I'd go to the Fred Miranda forums.

I have been on Flickr (as "gdanmitchell") for a really long time — probably almost as long as Flickr has been around. I keep my account alive and continue to post there — in fact, it is part of my workflow for the daily photographs that I have posted at my website since about 2003.

(I pre-post most of the website image — e.g. schedule them in advance — and simultaneously put them on Flickr. They don't show up on social media until the day that they "go live" on my website... but they are available earlier via Flickr.)

It has its pluses and minuses.

In my case, it comprises an archive of virtually every image I have ever shared online. It is searchable... and sometimes it is easier for me to find an image there than in my own archives since I can easily search and then view pages of images at once.

One slight minus is that I don't feel there's a lot of interaction there beyond people looking at pictures. To be fair, that tends to be true on social media more and more, too.

Dan

I remember now one of the reasons I used Flickr less and less... The mobile app didn't work well in groups and comments. Has that been fixed? I spend so much time at a computer during working ours that I hate to sit at a computer when I'm home. Mostly just Android phone and Android tablet these days.

ChiJeff5 said:

I remember now one of the reasons I used Flickr less and less... The mobile app didn't work well in groups and comments. Has that been fixed? I spend so much time at a computer during working ours that I hate to sit at a computer when I'm home. Mostly just Android phone and Android tablet these days.

Click to expand...

A computer monitor is best for viewing photos. Looking on your phone just degrades the experience!

-M

ChiJeff5 said:

I started on Flickr about 15 years ago. Loved the community and platform at the time. I learned a lot in my early years by posting photos to critique groups. Things changed and I started spending more time on Instagram. Then the Flickr subscription model and pricing changed a few years ago and I stopped paying.

Now I'm getting tired of Instagram and thinking about going back to Flickr. What I miss most are the discussions and critique. Is there a lot in interaction on Flickr these days or is it just people dumping photos?

I'm not looking for cloud storage, just meaningful and interesting interaction with a wide variety of photographers at all skill levels.

Click to expand...

... on what your expectations are and what you're looking for. I checked out Instagram and I didn't really feel it was a great platform for photography and nothing else about it really appealed to me, so as far as photography goes my one and only gallery online (other than some random shots on Facebook) has been Flickr. It is certainly true that activity on Flickr has slowed down a bit, but if one is really careful about only joining groups that have the kind of photographs by the kind of photographers that they admire, it can be a pretty rewarding place to share one's work. Right now, I'm in a "closed" type of group with just 8 or so other like minded souls and we come up with new challenges every few months, go out shooting the stuff, compare each others work and critique it. I like that kind of thing.

As far as the whole subscription thing goes, I've been on there for going on 9 years and I'm still 100 photos away from the free limit. I don't use the site as a kind of "photo dump" or cloud storage type thing and only tend to post the better (but not always what I consider my absolute best), so I add photos at a pretty slow rate and even slower still these days as I'm more discerning about what I put up. At my rate it could take me several more years to get to that 1000 limit and once I do, I suppose that I'll just pay the $40 a year fee (I think that's the rate for it) to use the thing. I think that it's worth it. I feel like it's very well designed as a photo platform and even if it doesn't get the traffic that it once did that there's still plenty of good photographers on it which make it worth being a part of. If anything, I think that maybe many of the more casual snapshot shooters who once posted their photos in every group possible are gone, leaving mostly the more thoughtful, serious type photographers...

--
my flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/128435329@N08/

ChiJeff5 said:

I remember now one of the reasons I used Flickr less and less... The mobile app didn't work well in groups and comments. Has that been fixed? I spend so much time at a computer during working ours that I hate to sit at a computer when I'm home. Mostly just Android phone and Android tablet these days.

Click to expand...

That is true... it rarely even occurs to me to mess with this kind of stuff on my phone, other than just looking at others' new photos and comments on my own stuff. I remember though that when I tried to add my photos to various groups using my phone that it was glitchy...

I have quite a few photos on flickr but have never used it for discussion or critique.

Kent

KENTGA said:

I have quite a few photos on flickr but have never used it for discussion or critique.

Kent

Click to expand...

Well... why not?!! Seriously, though that isn't really them primary reason I'm on there (i just really like having an online curated gallery of my work), I have been fortunate enough to find a few like minded photographers and have been a part of some groups where we post and critique each others' work. I find it an enjoyable, sometimes even useful activity...

ChiJeff5 said:

I started on Flickr about 15 years ago. Loved the community and platform at the time. I learned a lot in my early years by posting photos to critique groups. Things changed and I started spending more time on Instagram. Then the Flickr subscription model and pricing changed a few years ago and I stopped paying.

Now I'm getting tired of Instagram and thinking about going back to Flickr. What I miss most are the discussions and critique. Is there a lot in interaction on Flickr these days or is it just people dumping photos?

I'm not looking for cloud storage, just meaningful and interesting interaction with a wide variety of photographers at all skill levels.

Click to expand...

The thing I like about Flickr over instagram is the idea that you can have an album of images. With IG it's harder, and IG's objective (compared to Flickr) is different too: IG is for sharing (as is Flickr) but more for at-the-moment type of things, wereas with Flickr you can build a gallery over time or whatever of related images. Yes it is possible to combine images together into a slide show (in a way) in Instagram but it's not the same.

I'm not a huge fan of IG myself, but i do use it to connect with others and see other's work, but I think I might start using my Flickr account (which has been sitting idle for the past 2 years) a bit more. I feel its more of a community than IG ever is and it's more focused on sharing your photos in a community-like fashion with some level of organization.

That being said ,I think Flickr is doing OK, although I'm not sure I would pay the full price for it yet (the Pro subscription, as I just haven't used it and am not sure how much I would use it -- if I find myself using it a lot, I might be inclined to pay the fee).

The biggest thing for me on IG (that annoys me) is the videos, advertisements and the racheting down on accounts (not to mention the number of people I know who have been hacked on IG and FB) and the random account suspensions for no apparent reasons. Don't recall people complaining too much about Flickr in those regards.