Yahoo-owned Flickr is one of the largest content sources for Pinterest, with users posting Flickr images on the pinboard sharing site in droves. But in order to Pin a Flickr photo on Pinterest, you had to use Pinterest’s own Pin button, and you couldn’t Pin photos to pinboards directly from Flickr. Until today. Flickr, which just debuted a new HTML5 photo uploader last week, is announcing a partnership with Pinterest to add Pin It buttons to sharing options on the photo sharing platform. Flickr also assures that all pinned images will be properly attributed, regardless where they are pinned from.
As Flickr’s head of product, Markus Spiering, explains to us, the photos sharing site wanted to make sharing to Pinterest a one to two click process, for both content owners and for people who discover interesting photos on Flickr to be pinned. Now, you’ll see a Pin It button on Flickr image pages where you see Twitter, email, Facebook and Tumblr share buttons. You’ll be able to share photo pages, favorites, and groups. If you pin a lot, the share menu will prioritize the Pin It button, showing it as one of the two shortcuts on the photo page. → Read More
Yahoo’s photos sharing site, Flickr, has been steadily redesigning a number of components of its platform over the past few months, including editing (courtesy of Aviary), photo views and more. And today, Flickr, which says it is home to more than 7 billion photos, is debuting a new, speedier, HTML5 photo uploader for images.
With the HTML5 technology, Flickr’s uploader has a more robust experience, including drag and drop functionality. So instead of only being able to upload manually, you can add photos by dragging them into the browser. Yahoo will also show your thumbnail previews of photos, so you can manage and reorder photos before they hit your photostream. And you can zoom, rotate or sort your photos by title within the uploader itself, as opposed to within the photostream. → Read More
500px, the photo sharing website that has become the new darling of the photo buff set, today rolled out a new $19.95/year ‘Plus’ membership plan, putting it more squarely in competition with Flickr.
Up until now, 500px’s premium offering has catered mostly to the “power user” and professional photographer set, with a $49.95/year “Awesome” plan offering unlimited uploads along with a personalized online portfolio. The new “Plus” offering is meant to address more middle market users — it offers the same unlimited uploads and detailed user analytics provided by the “Awesome” plan, but without the personal portfolio feature. The site also has a free membership that allows for 10 photo uploads per week. → Read More
Aviary, the company that makes it easy for mobile developers to integrate image editing into their apps, is debuting a huge partnership today. The New York-based startup will be powering photo editing for Flickr’s 75 million users.
Picnik was the default photo editor for Flickr for some time now, even after Google bought the startup. But Google decided to shut down Picnik, and and editor will be removed from Flickr as of April 19, 2012.
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Yahoo’s management of Flickr has been something of a mystery. The photo-hosting service, once far and away the frontrunner and choice of pros and casual shooters alike, has seen few improvements in recent years — an eternity in the fast-moving online photography space. Many (including myself) cling to the service out of a kind of inertia, but it’s hard not to be jealous of the whiz-bang layouts and features of newer sites and services like 500px and Instagram. Even communities like Google+ and Pinterest are making Flickr users second-guess themselves.
It looks as though Flickr is finally getting the makeover it has deserved for years, though: launching on the 28th is a whole new layout and upload style, with an emphasis on community and consumption. → Read More
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
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