This morning, online photo sharing site Flickr joined the growing number of web companies protesting the SOPA and PIPA legislation, which now include Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, and others. For a 24-hour period, starting today, Flickr is letting its members darken their own photos in an effort to raise awareness about the proposed, highly damaging legislation. But that’s not all – Flickr is going a step further, and will allow users to darken other members’ photos, too. Now that’s what censorship really feels like. → Read More
I’ve been looking for something like this for years: a central, easy-to-use site for stock photos. Called PhotoPin, the site features a search engine that trolls Flickr for pictures. Some of them are also available to buy, but the vast majority are CC licensed.
Obviously the site (it’s more a widget, really) reminds you to link back to the original image, but if you’ve ever tried to find an acceptable image for “ninja stormtrooper” then you’ll understand the value of the site. → Read More
Flickr has just pushed out an update to its iPhone app, easing the batch upload process and making some UI tweaks. It will surely be welcomed by the many Flickr users who use iPhones, but Flickr’s continual reticence to develop for new platforms remains a problem. It took them more than a year to produce a native iPhone app, about the same for Android. We’re coming up on the two-year mark for the iPad — isn’t it about time?
Let’s hope so. It’s a big opportunity, and with rumors of a high-resolution iPad around the corner with the chops to do Photoshops, Flickr should be straining at the bit. → Read More
Being an Android user as well as a Flickr user has been dangerous territory for quite a long time now. There’s been no official app, and the third-party ones haven’t been too hot. Luckily for us, Yahoo has finally dropped a Flickr app that not only has their official blessing, but doesn’t suck at all. → Read More
The buzz in photography circles this past weekend was a post by Thomas Hawk declaring “Flickr is Dead.” It’s not the first time we’ve heard this attention-grabbing headline. By the numbers, it’s hard to call a photo sharing site with more than 5 billion photos “dead” just yet, and Hawk admits it will take time. But, Yahoo-owned Flickr is facing increasing competition and influential photographers are choosing to upload elsewhere. → Read More
This past June, we noted that Instagram hit a big milestone: 5 million users. At the time, the total number of photos shared on the service was at 95 million, and given the rate of growth, they expected to pass 100 million shortly. Well, they missed pointing out that milestone, but today, not even two months later, they’re pointing out another one: 150 million photos.
That’s 150 million photos uploaded to Instagram in just the 9 months since the app launched. For comparison’s sake, it took Flickr nearly two years to hit 100 million total photos on their service. Incredibly, Instagram is now seeing 1.3 million photos uploaded each day — that’s a rate of 15 photos per second. → Read More
As Mike Arrington wrote back in April, it can sometimes feel like certain photo-sharing websites have more of a hostage-taking approach to their business models than a “lets-please-the-customer” model. The photo-sharing experience then effectively becomes synonymous with platform lock-in — if you try to leave, you may not be able to take your images with you. Or, if you do, you’ll have to pay the price, Budnick. (But, wait, whose photos are they again? Oh, right.)
It’s for this reason that Jaisen Mathai is building an open source photo-sharing service called, you bet, OpenPhoto. → Read More
Earlier today, TUAW noted that according to Flickr’s stats, the iPhone 4 is now the most popular camera across the site. Yes, it has overtaken all those professional cameras, all the point-and-shoots, etc. That’s huge.
But the news came with a caveat. And it’s actually a big one.
As TUAW notes at the bottom of their post, the caveat is Flickr admitting that they’re only able to detect the camera used to take photos “about 2/3rds of the time”. But the key part is the next sentence: “That is not usually possible with cameraphones, therefore they are under-represented.” → Read More
The photo-sharing space continues to heat up, and continues to leave dominant player in the space Flickr in the dust innovation wise. If one thing’s becoming clear, it’s that it must be really painful to work at Yahoo and have any sort of passion for good product design.
The latest example of this comes from Flickr designer Timoni West, who has publicly criticized the service on her personal blog, in a post called “The Most Important Page On Flickr.” In the post Timoni links to the Flickr contacts page and breaks down what’s wrong with it, namely that on a micro-level that there is no chronological way to sort photos, the thumbnail size is too small and there’s no way to see all of a user’s recent photos without visiting their profile. → Read More
If you ever wanted a glimpse of what the Spiderman “With great power comes great responsibility” quote looks like actualized, take a second to digest the above photo of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and various others in the White House Situation room, captured as they “receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden.” Because I look exactly like Clinton when I receive “updates.”
Not surprisingly the unnervingly human photo has captured popular imagination over the past day and a half, becoming the point of origin of a multitude of Photoshop memes which range from Jersey Shore’s Situation being placed in the Situation Room, to the Royal Wedding’s Grumpy Flower girl joining in on the fun, to everybody wearing Princess Beatrice’s absurd Royal Wedding hat, which was particularly inspired. Sure this is great guys, but I’m still waiting for the Tiger Wood’s cigar dude, Dramatic Squirrel and Disaster Girl insertions, granted I’m a dork. → Read More
Yes I know that Flickr offers a dinky Facebook Newsfeed sync and there are plenty of other services that offer pretty complex Flickr photo-syncing tools, but this post is for the three of you that want to prevent this from happening to you and don’t have 20 minutes to spend figuring something else out. → Read More
Tech pundits like to compare Instagram and Flickr, because they both created a lot of excitement and a community around photo-sharing in their heydays (Instagram is currently in the middle of its moment).
Both take/took advantage of the zeitgeist tech concepts of the time, Flickr leveraged tagging and the ability to upload a photo via an email address and Instagram leveraged the proliferation of the iPhone camera, Twitter and the popularity of adding filters to photos in order to add novelty and value to the space. Both experienced extreme levels of popularity, but the influence of one is waning just as the other is picking up. → Read More
What’s the most popular camera used in terms of pictures taken that are uploaded to Flickr? Right now, it’s the Nikon D90. But in about a month or so, it will be Apple’s iPhone 4. What’s amazing is that D90 is nearly three years old. The iPhone 4 is not even a year old. Just look at a the chart above. The rise has been spectacular.
But it’s hardly the first time an iPhone has risen this quickly. Back in 2009, the iPhone overtook the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi as the most popular camera on Flickr. The difference is that at the time, Flickr was counting all the iPhone models together. That meant the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G, and the iPhone 3GS were all clumped together to overtake the Canon model. Now they’re split up, and the iPhone 4 alone is still going to be the most popular camera on Flickr in under a year. It’s pretty remarkable, really. → Read More
Freemium business models are always hard. You have to give users enough for free that they try your service out and get hooked. Then you hit them with fees for upgraded features that make it even better. With a perfect product people don’t mind paying because they feel like it’s good value.
Flickr is a freemium service. But they have more of a hostage taking business model. It may make people cough up the money, but they sure aren’t happy about it. I, for one, have been staring them down for years now. It’s not a fight I think I’ll win, but it’s one that I’m willing to whine loudly about.
On the surface Flickr’s pro service, currently $25/year, seems fair. The free service lets you upload a certain amount of photos, up to a certain maximum size per photo. The pro version allows unlimited uploading and a bigger maximum size per photo. → Read More
Photo-sharing site Flickr, which has limitless potential in terms of the sheer number of photos stored on the service (over 5 billion at last count), has made it easier for users to share their photos today with new Twitter and Facebook “Share This” features. A share interface re-vamp comes along with the new features.
While previously you could only share photostreams, groups, and sets from Flickr by sending an email, manually grabbing the link/code or on Blogger, users now have the option to post individual photos and everything else on Facebook and Twitter as well as on Tumblr via “Share This” drop down menu in the upper left. → Read More
Flickr’s recently departed product chief Matthew Rothenberg is landing in a new job in New York City. He was just hired by bitly to become its new VP of Product. He will be moving from California. Score another one for the New York startup scene.
Rothenberg’s decision to leave Flickr, which he says has more to do with personal reasons, is nevertheless seen as yet another sign that Flickr is ailing under Yahoo. → Read More
When you ask Yahoo who is in charge of Flickr, they always point to one man: Matthew Rothenberg. Well, technically, there are people at Yahoo above him in charge of the group of products that Flickr is in (Applications Division). But it’s Rothenberg, as head of product, who they’ll tell you is leading the day to day.
Not anymore.
Rothenberg is out as head of product for Flickr. He tweeted the news himself earlier today. He had been on the team for five years, dating back to when original co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake were still running the ship. They left long ago, but Rothenberg stuck around. And for the past two years, he’s been the guy in charge. → Read More
Last weekend Egyptian protestors broke into Amn al Dowla, the Cairo headquarters for the Egyptian security agency, and removed a “treasure trove” of video disks, hard disks and CDs with government documents from the Mubarak era.
Egyptian blogger Hossam Arabway came into possession of a CD from the raid and has been uploading a set of Secret Service officer pics to Flickr for the past week. Arabway posted on his on blog that Flickr removed the photos yesterday, citing copyright infringement. Arabway’s post led to NPR’s Andy Carvin asking Flickr for a response to the accusations of censorship. → Read More
Right now Yahoo engineer Jeremy Johnstone is my hero. Frustrated with with Flickr’s lack of HTML5 support on the web, Johnstone — whose position is currently “Technical Yahoo!” on the Yahoo For Good team — has decided to take his employer to task, where else? In his Flickr stream.
Earlier today Johnstone posted the above image, with the following barb.
“No Flickr, you have it wrong. I don’t need to install anything. I just need to use a different site to host my video which properly supports modern web technologies.”
Yahoo’s Flickr may have another PR nightmare on their hands. IT architect and Flickr user Mirco Wilhelm couldn’t log on to his 5-year old account yesterday, and when he asked the Flickr team about this issue they flat out told him they had accidentally flushed his entire account, and the 4,000 photos that were in it, straight down the drain.
Apparently Wilhelm reported a Flickr user with an account that held ‘obviously stolen material’ to the company last weekend, but a staff member erroneously incinerated his account instead of the culprit’s. → Read More
