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.

For those unaware, living under rocks, etc., Congress is considering two bills, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, which would effectively censor the web. They’re the result of seriously misguided attempts to fight online piracy, which, if enacted, would eliminate due process and fundamentally change how the Internet works.

Flickr’s solution for awareness-raising is one of the more creative ones we’ve seen. Instead of taking its whole website down, as Wikipedia did, it’s allowing members to practice, and feel the effects of web censorship directly. Anyone can darken their own photos, but the kicker is that others’ can darken your own photos, too. That’s something that hits closer to home than web banners, blog posts, and cute videos.  Now, even if you’re trying to ignore the news of SOPA (hey, I can live without Wikipedia for a day!), you’ll know how it feels when powers beyond your control take away content you should have access to.

Well kind of.

According to Flickr’s announcement, members can only darken up to 10 photos, then the option will be taken away. (I guess they didn’t want big-time SOPA supporters spending all day blacking out its entire archive of photos? Too bad.) And since Flickr also offers a paid service used by professional photographers, there is an opt-out mechanism so your photos won’t be darkened, which you can choose from any photo.

Even though Flickr’s joining of the SOPA fight came at the last minute – early morning on protest day itself – it’s good to see another big name involved. For more information on SOPA, check out TechCrunch’s previous coverage here.

Update: As of 2 pm PT on 1/18/12 Flickr members darkened 219,644 photos and these blacked-out photos have received up to 1,034,896 views.

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.

The site is surprisingly barren but quite handsome and much better than the jumble that is Flickr’s own CC site. It’s a clever site and an interesting diversion on this fine Friday afternoon. There is actually no contact information on the site itself, so there’s no telling how long it will stay up or if they’re looking for funding.

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.

The current apps for the iPad aren’t awful or anything: FlickStackr looks nice, and appears more functional than the iPhone app. A new iPad app called Lens.ly launched today that stores your photos locally, though it looks overly simplistic and kind of redundant. Flickr should have owned this space from the beginning, as they must know there’s a good overlap between their users and iOS users.

Flickr seems to have missed the boat for social interaction, though there’s definitely an active on-site community. It’s not a fundamentally social service, so compared to something like Instagram it will always be lacking a bit. But many photographers use and like the service, so Flickr should cater to them. More community, more discovery, more functionality for, say, importing shots directly from the camera or card, that sort of thing.

If the high-resolution thing turns out to be true, then the new iPad will be very popular among photographers and artists. That would definitely be a time to invest and strike. I’m a Flickr user myself and would happily pay for a “Pro” app that made my iPad into more than a viewing window for my content.

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.

It’s quite full-featured, not just a photostream browser. You can, of course, look at your own pictures or those of others, and the experience is pleasant and Flickr-y. You can even directly download the full-size images to email or use as wallpaper. The app starts up in your activity stream, though, where your recent favorites and so on are shown. Naturally nobody likes my photos, but I assume more accomplished photographers will welcome the easy access to recent comments and favorites.

There’s a nice little camera app in there, too. You can choose different aspect ratios, apply filters (named after places and imperfectly represented in the menu), add details, and send directly to social networks or email addresses. And naturally they go right into your Flickr account as well. Here’s one I took for demonstration purposes. It has the “Java” filter applied.

Not an Instagram-killer by any means, but again, Flickr lovers will like it. Unfortunately you can’t add to sets, which would be handy for keeping your mobile shots separate from your “real” pictures.

It’s a solid little app if you’ve got the bandwidth for it (you might want to use the wi-fi) and don’t need any of the more advanced features like groups and collections. Hopefully they’ll expand the community portion a little more in the next release. More screenshots and info can be found in the Android Market. The app is just called “Flickr” and is published by Yahoo Inc, in case it doesn’t show up for your search right away.

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 6 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.

Hawk, who was an early Flickr evangelist, first asks readers to compare his Flickr page, with its “same view since 2004″ to his infinite scrolling Google+ photo page. But his real moment of realization came last week. Trey Ratcliff, an expert in HDR photos who also runs a popular travel photo blog called “Stuck In Customs“, led a photowalk at Stanford that more than 200 photographers of all skill levels attended. They are still trying to confirm this, but it might have been a “World Record” photowalk turnout.

Hawk writes “What was everybody talking about at the photowalk? Flickr? No. Google+? Yes. Not only was everyone talking about Google, there were tons of people from Google who were there.” The list of Googlers included the Google Photos Community Manager and the guy who built their lightbox.

I attended the very informative walk. It may have been the first Google+ flash mob. At times I thought the event was an official Google company event, but it wasn’t. Everyone was talking about photography and Google+. The group photo (above) was posted to Google+ and many faces tagged. Everyone was invited to add their photos and comments about the walk on Google+.

Hawk recalls “Flickr used to feel like this.” Years ago, he says Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield would attend the Flickr meetups. But, those meetups don’t happen any more. A SF Flickr Meetup Group had only 3 posts this year. He writes Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz doesn’t have a Flickr account, while Google co-founder Sergey Brin posted underwater photos last week to Google+.

There are still many more people putting pictures on Flickr compared to the newcomer Google+. And one photowalk isn’t going to change everything. But, many passionate and influential photographers are switching from Flickr to Google Photos and a host of other photo sharing sites like 500px and Instagram.

Most importantly, in Hawk’s view, Flickr has “lost the soul of photosharing. They’ve lost the spirit of photosharing — the zest and the passion and love — and while they got away with that for a long time due to lack of competition, things have now changed.”

Frederick Van Johnson, the host of the popular photography podcast, This Week in Photo (TWiP), agrees. He told me “Flickr’s lack of innovation is a crime that’s punishable by death — and we the jury are voting with where we choose to host our photos.”

In additional to Google Photos, Flickr is facing competition from Instagram, launched just 9 months ago and only available on the iPhone. Instagram just reported its 150 millionth photo. It took Flickr nearly 2 years to reach 100 million photos.

TechCrunch has been reporting on Flickr’s problems for awhile. Earlier this year, Michael Arrington stopped using Flickr. He explained his reasons in a post called “I Won’t Use Flickr Until They Release My Photo Hostages.” Flickr’s head of product, Matthew Rothenberg left in March. The founders, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, who created the company in 2004, sold it to Yahoo in 2005, and left in 2008. Alexia Tsotsis wrote about the Flickr designer who publicly criticized Flickr’s design.

Hawk’s article has generated some good discussion on his blog, Hacker News and Google+. Commentors pointed out that Hawk has 60,000 photos in his Flickr photostream which appears to the right of his “Flickr is Dead” post. But that just shows someone like Hawk, who is clearly a power user of Flickr, is not happy. He’s the type of paying “Pro” user Flickr needs to keep.

A commenter named Jolene compared Flickr to an ex-beau. “It’s still out there… you remember how much in love you once were, how you thought it was going to be forever. Eventually, you grew apart.”

In researching this article, I learned from the Flickr blog that its 5 billionth photo was uploaded last September. But on the first page of its “Welcome Tour,” it claims just “over 4 billion photos.” In addition to a lack of innovation and updates on the product, Flickr can’t even update the information on its own site to reflect the addition of 1 billion more photos. How many billion more will it get?

Update: It turns out Flickr reported its 6 billionth photo earlier this month. While I’ve updated this post, now Flickr’s Welcome Tour page is 2 billion photos out of date.

Update 2: One day after my post, Flickr has updated their Welcome Tour page to reflect the fact they have over 6 billion photos.

Photo Credit: Peter Adams, posted on Google+

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.

The service is now well past 7 million users, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom tells us. Again, that’s up over 2 million in under 2 months. Without any sort of strategic promotions, they’re grown to become a mainstay in the top 25 free app in Apple’s App Store.

Yes, Flickr may now be well past 5 billion photos, and Facebook can see 750 million photos uploaded in one crazy weekend, but remember that Instagram is still only available on one platform: iOS. Every single one of those 150 million photos has been uploaded from an iPhone (and to a much lesser extent, iPod touches and iPads). You can’t yet use Instagram from any other devices, and you can’t even upload photos from your computer. And while Android support will come, the experience is going to remain predominantly a mobile one, Systrom says.

One more crazy stat: Systrom says that of the 150 million photos, 80 percent have had filters applied to them. And of the remaining 20 percent, plenty of those originate from other iPhone camera apps with their own filters.

Oh, and don’t forget Bieber.

Above, find the 150 millionth photo from user janefot.

It’s for this reason that Jaisen Mathai is building a service called OpenPhoto. At the end of May, Mathai quit his job at Yahoo (like so many before him), where he had served in various engineering roles since 2007. Because of the frustration of having to watch Yahoo let an awesome startup like Flickr fizzle, (“I was extremely frustrated by the lack of product vision”, he says) and having years of experience building applications — and even building his own photo apps — Mathai took to Kickstarter.

Unfortunately for him, however, there are already more photo-sharing applications than there are humans on the planet, and photo apps (for how much we seem to write about them), was one of the demographics to receive the least amount of venture funding over the last year.

This is part of the reason why Mathai has taken to Kickstarter instead of chasing down VCs and angels. It’s also because, to use a tired phrase, Kickstarter is a site designed for the people, with funding by (and for) the people. And Mathai says, knowing it may sound trite, that he’s trying to do the same thing with OpenPhoto — not only that, but he’s trying to avoid the mistakes that Yahoo made with Flickr.

The motive: Mathai says that he believes, plain and simply, that the photos one uploads and shares on the Web belong to that person and that person alone — and should, therefore, be portable. If one decides to switch to a different service, then they should be able to easily move all of their photos, tags, and comments to the other service. It’s a no hostage policy. (The U.N. is going to love it.)

With OpenPhoto, Mathai is transparently attempting to put the user back in control of where their photos are stored, so the service will allow users to freely select which cloud storage and database services meet their needs, based on whichever selling point matters to them — price, security, and trust. If a new service comes along, users can take their photos to that service without losing a single photo, tag or comment.

For example, OpenPhoto users can select Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloudfiles, Dropbox or any other service with a file storage API to store their photos. (This also applies to databases such as Amazon SimpleDb or MongoHQ for their tags and comments.)

In turn, Mathai wants to build two versions of OpenPhoto — one installable, and one hosted — yet both are free and allow photos to be easily uploaded and shared via email, Facebook, Twitter and more. Mathai also said, via his “Kickstarter Deliverables” that he wants to “document the crap out of” the design and coding process so that others can take advantage of the API and build their own OpenPhoto apps.

The open source, installable version will, of course, be available on Github. Mathai also has some other features he’d like to see be part of the service, like mobile apps for iOS and Android and a marketplace for designers to create their own themes, but he has to get to the $25,000 goal first. And he’s got a long way to go.

What’s more, if you’d like to see this crazy idealist in the fury of coding, you’re likely to find him at the Hacker Dojo, throwing darts at print outs of Instagram photos.

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.”

“Not usually possible”. In other words, the iPhone 4 has likely been the number one camera for a long time.

We noted this caveat when we last looked over the data in April. It’s likely that the iPhone 4 was already the top camera then, and probably for some time before then too. Looking over my own Flickr pictures, I see that any photos I’ve sent to Flickr via Instagram over the past several months are stripped of the iPhone 4 identifier. In other words, basically all of the pictures that myself and every other person I know have put on Flickr in recent months have not counted towards this iPhone 4 ascension to the top. Other apps also strip out this info. Circumstantially, I believe Flickr’s data for the iPhone 4 is very low.

Less circumstantially, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom confirms that they cannot pass the iPhone 4 metadata to Flickr due to an iOS limitation. And yes, it affects other iOS apps. Therefore, the counts are really, really low. He told me to go to the recently-uploaded Flickr page and refresh a few times to see how often a new Instagram photo shows up. There are so many — yeah, these numbers are way off.

And if they’re low for the iPhone 4, they’re low for the other iPhone models as well. This means that the second most popular iPhone model on Flickr, the iPhone 3G, is also likely in Flickr’s top 5 cameras. The fifth camera they list is the Canon EOS REBEL T1i, which had 3,794 users yesterday. The iPhone 3G had 3,168 users yesterday — but again, the data is off. Hell, I’m not sure that with the correct data, the iPhone 3G wouldn’t be number two on the list.

The same issue likely applies to Android phones as well. Though for whatever reason, those numbers are really low on Flickr. According to Flickr, the most popular Android phone for taking pictures is the EVO 4G. But it had just 590 users yesterday (again, likely low). The iPod touch had 507 users yesterday (again, low). The EVO 4G has an 8 megapixel camera. The iPod touch has a 0.7 megapixel camera. One is clearly meant to be used as a still camera. One is not. That’s sad.

Yes, I know that the individual iPhone numbers benefit from their being fewer models to choose from. But looking over the other popular Android models, it’s pretty clear that all of them together doesn’t hold a candle to the numbers the iPhones are putting up on Flickr. The under-reported numbers.

Meanwhile, take your time on that kickass iPhone photo-sharing app, Flickr. It’s not like you have the numbers to justify its existence.

The photo-sharing space continues to heat up, and continues to leave dominant player 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 pain point 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 > Recent Uploads 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.

But what West finds most problematic is that …

“The page fails on a fundamental level—it’s supposed to be where you find out what’s happened on Flickr while you were away. The current design, unfortunately, encourages random clicking, not informed exploration.

The page isn’t just outdated, it’s actively hurting Flickr, as members’ social graphs on the site become increasingly out of sync with real life. Old users forget to visit the site, new sign ups are never roped in, and Flickr, who increased member sign-ups substantially in 2010, will forego months of solid work when new members don’t come back.”

Power Flickr users, desperate for a platform that provides the sense of community early Flickr did, are moving on to Instagram, 500px and the recently launched Mlkshk. As Flickr user and developer Buzz Andersen put it, “This highly perceptive post by @Timoni almost completely covers the reasons my use of Flickr has declined over time.”

Many feel like Flickr has swerved from its original course of being a community of photographers and photosharers to being a storage center. Jason Kottke (Kottke!) referred to the problem as such, “Flickr has become a shoebox under the bed instead of the door of the refrigerator or workplace bulletin board. “

Thomas Hawk is one of the early Flickr evangelists who moved on because of lack of community, leaving the service for 500px, “500px is like Flickr was in the early day. They care about the users. Flickr doesn’t anymore … [500px CEO] Ian Sobolev is interacting with users like Stewart/Caterina did. Flickr censors, bans, deletes and talks down to their users.”

But West thinks (or rather, writes) that there’s still a glimmer of hope, that Flickr still has the ability to “kick ass in this arena.” But she modifies her assertion with “They just have to build it” and her statement is decidedly less powerful when taken in the context of the “This post is largely taken from a proposed redesign I sent out last year” sentence in the introduction.

Last year!!!

With no such redesign in sight one can’t help but feel that West’s insightfulness is lost on Yahoo. And that Instagram should probably hire her to build its web platform.

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 other PCs 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 The 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.

The photo was posted post-Bin Laden death announcement on May 2nd at 10am PDT via the White House’s Flickr account. Flickr for some reason was tracking the pic, and graciously has given us the following viewer stats; 390,000 views at 3:30pm (5.5 hours later at 71,000 views per hour),
 600,000 at 5pm (7 hours later at 140,000 views/hour) and 
1,400,000 at 11am today (25 hours later at 44,000 views/hour). The White House Flickr account averages 100K views per day, and yesterday it received 2.5 million views, and as of 7pm today it already had 3.6 million views — An order of magnitude greater than normal.

People familiar with the matter are saying that this is the probably the fastest viewed ever photo on on Flickr. Flickr itself will only officially say that it’s the fastest one they’ve tracked and that a certain photo from the Royal Wedding has amassed over 1.3 million views since Saturday.

At 1,597,561 views currently, the Situation Room image is already more than half way towards beating the current most viewed Flickr photo, the relatively banal snapshot of Nohkalikai Falls, Cherraphunjee which was taken in 2006 and has garned 2,978,625 views after five years. The Situation Room photo amassed its 1,597,561 views after a little under 38 hours.

Damn.

Image via The White House

My attempts to sync my Flickr photos to Facebook manually through Facebook Activity Updates are still loading so I’m just going use that time to write about a faster and more effective way to do this.

Created by Paul Carduner, PhotoSync allows you to sync all or a few of your Flickr albums to Facebook and doesn’t take an eternity. The service partions large versions of your Flickr photos and albums into matching Facebook albums and keeps syncing both accounts every hour, with no effort on your part.

Unfortunately PhotoSync doesn’t import the Flickr Pro photo hostages, but for that TechCrunch reader Gaurav Sharma has a work around:

Simply search “http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Aflickr.com+inurl%3Aphotos%2Fmichaelarrington%2F(*)%2F” with your Flickr user name instead of “michaelarrington” and Google will show you photos beyond your 200 Flickr Pro limit. Building a Google scraper or having access to the Google Custom Search API will allow to download your photos.

So there you go.

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 at 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.

In answering the “Why did Flickr miss the mobile photo opportunity that Instagram and picplz are pursuing?” question on Quora, former Flickr architect Kellan Elliott-McCrea cited the two companies as counterpoints in “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” or the situation where a market leader is about to be unseated by a challenger because it is too slow-moving and ignores the markets likely to foster disruptive innovation.

And now current Yahoo employee and Games Head of Product Greg Cohn, who has been at Yahoo for over six years, also makes the comparison by tweeting out “Instagram right now has the feel of early Flickr.”

While I’ve reached out to Cohn for more information, the gist of this is pretty clear: Instagram, racking up 3 million users in six months and adding novel features like “Tilt Shift” with every iOS update seems to be innovating like early (Butterfield-era) Flickr.

And Flickr, which just added Facebook and Twitter social share buttons on a whim 20 days ago, is not, presumably stifled by Yahoo bureaucracy. When asked what the difference was between now and pre-Yahoo acquisition Flickr, Flickr power user Thomas Hawke remarked, “Early Flickr was very innovative. Nothing like the slow moving static thing it’s become today. [It was] more like, well, Instagram today.” 

Here’s to Instagram avoiding the same fate.

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.

It also speaks to just how badly Flickr has dropped the ball with regard to mobile. We’ve previously delved into this topic when recounting a former Yahoo employee talking about how Flickr should have built a service like Instagram, but simply couldn’t due to bureaucracy. Flickr has long had the data to show that smartphone cameras were starting to dominate the market, but they really didn’t do anything about it.

The chart below is even more interesting. The “popular” point & shoot camera are all tanking, quickly. You’d think there would be one that is still doing well, but when compared to the high end (SLR) market and the smartphone market, they’re in a total nosedive. This will only get worse. As we’ve also previously written, the point & shoots have also totally dropped the ball with regard to the social photo revolution — they’ve committed seppuku.

Six months ago, the data looked bad for point & shoots. Now it looks downright frightening. If the trend continues (and it’s actually speeding up), the point & shoot is finished.

Flickr’s data obviously isn’t absolute. But they do have a wide range of users who are interested in photography uploading to their site. And the main disclaimers they give about their data is that smartphone data may actually be under-represented. So yes, it’s not looking good for point & shoots.

And if you were to lump all the iPhone models together, they would be so far ahead of every other camera that the graph would look absurd. This is the state of photography right now. And it’s going to continue in this direction.

While Android has overtaken the iPhone in terms of market share, none of their individual phone models are doing particularly well from a photo-taking perspective. It’s hard to say why this is — lack of a good Flickr Android app, or just because there are so many different model? But with the iPhone 5 now not likely launching until the fall, the iPhone 4 will have plenty of time to sit on the crown and expand upon it.

Flickr, meanwhile, will have plenty of time to contemplate what they missed out on in the mobile photo revolution happening on their own charts. And the point & shoots will have plenty of time to bleed.

(As an interesting sidenote: note how Apple is actually the least popular of the camera brands on Flickr. Is it because they only have four models? Or is Flickr’s data just wrong? Also worth noting: the iPad 2 is not doing well as a camera in terms of Flickr pictures. No surprise there — it’s simply not good for still image capture.)

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.

Reasonable? Absolutely. I originally upgraded to Pro almost immediately after using the service so that I could upload lots of pictures all the time.

But I’m guessing the real reason most people upgrade isn’t to get unlimited uploading. Rather, it’s because Flickr holds your old photos hostage until you pay up.

My Pro account expired at some point, probably because I missed an email or my credit card number changed. I wasn’t using Flickr as much, having moved more to Facebook because of the structured people tagging feature. But then one day I was searching for an old treasured photo that existed only on Flickr and on the hard drive of some long forgotten and discarded mobile phone.

Flickr won’t show me that photo. If your pro account expires only your last 200 photos are shown. The only way I can get access to that photo is by paying the Pro fee.

That is absolutely no way to treat a customer.

And it doesn’t make sense for Flickr. Even though I uploaded those photos as a Pro customer, I can’t see them any more. It’s not that they aren’t just displayed on my public profile, I can’t access them in account settings, either. And even the ones that are displayed are only downloadable in a smaller resized version. Originals are held hostage as well.

Will I pay the Pro fee to get these photos back? No. Although I understand that many people will. But those people will not be happy customers, and they will likely just download their photos at that point and never go back to Flickr again. People certainly shouldn’t get comfortable using Flickr as a repository for their photos over the years, because unless you pay the Pro fee, you’ll lose them forever.

That isn’t what Flickr should want to be. They should want people to feel safe uploading their photos, knowing that they have ultimate control to access and download them in the future.

Flickr has sat on the sidelines as mobile photo apps have come into their own. They aren’t a useful long term repository of your photos. And their business model involves hostage taking. Not exactly what I’d call a thumbs up.

If a photo service wants my business, at the very least they need to promise me the ability to download all my photos in original quality down the road. Because they’re my photos, Yahoo. Not yours.

Photo credit: Flickr/Matthias Weinberger

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 of each photo.

The new features interestingly enough operate on different privacy levels: Logged-in users will be able to share private photos with their friends on Facebook, but only public content will be available for sharing via Twitter and Tumblr or for logged out users on Facebook.

Flickr, probably feeling the heat from mobile social photo services like Instagram and even Color, plans on bringing these features to their mobile apps and sites as soon as possible. Welcome to the party Flickr.

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. As MG noted:

He made a “personal decision” — Yahoo clearly wants avoid the impression that he’s leaving a sinking ship. But there’s a reason we’ve kept hearing rumors about his imminent departure: the situation is not great inside the once proud service.

On the bright side, the fact that Bitly is hiring him says a lot about its ambitions to build out more consumer-facing services. Flickr is still arguably one of Yahoo’s best products, and the man who was in charge of making them an enjoyable experience will now be bringing his talents to bitly. You might think of bitly as just a URL shortener, but stay tuned. Theres a lot more coming.

Bitly CEO John Borthwick tells us that the company is “about the real time link data stack,” and a handful of services will launch in the coming months, including News.me, that illustrate the value of this data stack. He also revealed a few impressive stats regarding Bitly’s business and link-sharing. Last month, Bitly saw 7 billion clicks on its links and currently supports 8500 white label partners.

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.

One funny thing here is that we had been hearing for weeks that Rothenberg was leaving. But Yahoo kept denying it until the bitter end. But it’s hard to deny a public tweet, I guess.

Here’s their official statement:

Matthew Rothenberg has made the personal decision to move on to a new endeavor.  In the interim, Markus Spiering will be stepping in as head of product management. Flickr continues to have an innovative, energetic and creative leadership team that is dedicated to its community of members. Flickr remains a key priority for Yahoo! and we are fully committed to making it the best photo-sharing experience on the Web.

Note the wording. He made a “personal decision” — Yahoo clearly wants avoid the impression that he’s leaving a sinking ship. But there’s a reason we’ve kept hearing rumors about his imminent departure: the situation is not great inside the once proud service.

Following the leak of the “sunsetting” of Delicious, talk quickly moved to Flickr: what would happen there? Everyone was worried, but Yahoo publicly stated that they were very much backing the service. Still, ex-employees and users alike didn’t seem too sure about its future.

And lately, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk of internal turmoil within Yahoo and the Flickr group. Last fall, John Matheny took over the group Applications Division in charge. He’s an ex-Microsoft guy, and you may recall during the time when Microsoft was trying to buy Yahoo, users took to Flickr to boycott such a deal specifically because they did not like Microsoft. We’ve heard around a half dozen or so folks have left just in the past few months.

Of course, the situation wasn’t said to be much better before Matheny took over. Flickr has had some big time layoffs over the past couple of years and leaders have butted heads with those at Yahoo over direction.

Frankly, it’s surprising that Rothenberg stuck around this long. But now he’s gone (officially, his last day is next week, we hear). He’s moving on to greener pastures.

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 Arabawy 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. Arabawy posted on his on blog that Flickr removed the photos yesterday, citing copyright infringement. Arabawy’s post led to NPR’s Andy Carvin asking Flickr for a response to the accusations of censorship.

Flickr responded both to Carvin and to me, citing user complaints as impetus for the takedowns:

“The images in question were removed because they were not that member’s work. As stated by the Community Guidelines, ‘Flickr accounts are intended for members to share original photos and video that they themselves have created.’

Flickr isn’t a place for members to just host images but a place where members share original photos and video; and the Flickr community is built around that. For this reason, when we discover images that violate this provision, we may remove such images from the account and, in some instances, delete the account altogether.

While we regret that this action has upset the user, he must understand that this is not a decision we ever take lightly but only as necessary to ensure that Flickr remains a great place to creatively post and share original photos and videos with friends, family and the world.”

When asked whether the user complaints were specifically about the Community Guidelines, a Flickr representative responded, “After receiving complaints from other users about the set, we conducted a review and discovered that it was in violation of our Community Guidelines.  We then acted accordingly.”

Indeed, the photos in question were not taken by Arabawy. We could go on all night like this but the main point is Flickr has (a valid) excuse.

Update: Prominent member of the Flickr community Thomas Hawke writes that disingenuously chalking it up to Guidelines issues is a “giant cop out” on Flickr’s part as, “Flickr knows that Flickr is *full* of photos that are “not a member’s work.” Read his take here.

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.”

Right now Flickr video does support HTML5, but apparently only if it detects you have an iPad. And while the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and even IE9  are compatible with HTML5 (which does not require you to install a plugin to view video), people who want to watch Flickr videos without having to download Flash are out of luck. It’s enough to make a Technical Yahoo! go to Vimeo!

And yes I’m pretty sure this outburst is out of pure passion for innovation on Johnstone’s part, as his loyalty to Yahoo (which owns Flickr) is clear — At least judging from what he did to his car.

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.

Hello,

Unfortunately, I have mixed up the accounts and accidentally deleted yours. I am terribly sorry for this grave error and hope that this mistake can be reconciled. Here is what I can do from here:

I can restore your account, although we will not be able to retrieve your photos. I know that there is a lot of history on your account–again, please accept my apology for my negligence. Once I restore your account, I will add four years of free Pro to make up for my error.

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.
Again, I am deeply sorry for this mistake.

Regards,

Flickr staff

Ouch.

What amazes me most about this story is how calmly Wilhelm reacts to the termination of his account:

It is kind of nice, getting an additional 4 years of service subscription for free… but I already received free Pro subscriptions for the next year just by taking part in some events and competitions.

So how can this really compensate losing close to 4000 “linked” pictures from my web albums? I have to recreate most of these links manually, which will take weeks, if not months of my free time! Not to mention, external websites that had linked these images (including some official Yahoo! and Flickr blogs).

…

Since Flickr had deleted the account an all the related object, they cannot reactivate anything more that the account itself, leaving me with an empty shell of what I did during the last 5 years. This would be acceptable, if I had a free account. But since I’m a paying customer, I would expect a bit more that a “Again, I am deeply sorry for this mistake.”

I expect at least a process that can undo this kind of mistakes. For any other kind of compensation, I will take some time to consult.

I’ve never been a big Flickr user, but I had always assumed a simple click of the button couldn’t delete an account and its content altogether, rather than simply deactivate it.

It never occurred to me that a team member could just wipe out accounts without the means to reactivate them if it turned out to be a mistake.

And what about backups for Christ’s sake?

For what it’s worth, Flickr’s Zack Sheppard commented in the Flickr forum thusly:

We’ve been working on the ability to restore accounts for a while and hope to have it completed early this year.

We have been in contact with Mirco and may be able to restore his account. The partial work that has been done so far may make it possible to retrieve the account. It’s only a maybe but we want to try and do everything we can to rectify this mistake.

Just as people have stated above, we also believe this is an important feature to have in place for cases like this when there was an error. As many of you know we usually do not discuss features before they are released but because of the community concern we wanted to let you know in this case.

So basically there hasn’t been a way for Flickr to restore accidentally removed paid accounts since the company was founded, maybe they can do something about Mirco’s account (you have to wonder what would have happened hadn’t he raised a big stink about this in the first place) and users should be so lucky that Flickr is letting them know they might be able to restore erroneously terminated accounts at some point in the future.

Duly noted.

UPDATE: Yahoo issued this response:

Yesterday, Flickr mistakenly deleted a member’s account due to human error. Flickr takes user trust very seriously and we, like our users, take great pride in being able to take, post and share photos. Our teams are in touch with the member and are currently working hard to try to restore the contents of his account. In addition, we are providing the member with 25 years of free Flickr Pro membership. We are also actively working on a process that will allow us to easily restore deleted accounts and will roll this functionality out soon.

UPDATE 2:

Yahoo! is pleased to share that the Flickr team has fully restored a member’s account that was mistakenly deleted yesterday. We regret the human error that led to the mistake and have worked hard to rectify the situation, including reloading the entire photo portfolio and providing the member with 25 years of free Flickr Pro membership. Flickr takes the trust of our members very seriously and we appreciate the patience shown by this member and our community. Flickr will also soon roll out functionality that will allow us to restore deleted accounts more easily in the future.