Flickr is on its way out, what are your alternatives?
Jun 17, 2017
Daniela Bowker
Daniela Bowker is a writer and editor based in the UK. Since 2010 she has focused on the photography sector. In this time, she has written three books and contributed to many more, served as the editor for two websites, written thousands of articles for numerous publications, both in print and online, and runs the Photocritic Photography School.
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I uploaded a clutch of photos to Flickr on Sunday evening and as I hit the big pink button it occurred to me that using Flickr furnishes me with some seriously retro credentials. While Flickr used to be the place to hang out around 2008, its growth has stalled and the consensus is that Flickr used to be great–it could have been brilliant–but owing to a failure to develop it is a social media has-been. For some of us, this isn’t a problem; but it might become a problem in the not-too-distant future.
What’s the extent of Flickr’s decline?
Yahoo! doesn’t release user statistics for Flickr on a regular basis. However, I do have a source that claims Flickr had 122 million users in October 2016. So that’s from 0 to 122 million in 12 years. And it has a When you compare this against Instagram’s 0 to 700 million users between October 2010 and April 2017, the last 100 million of which were added in just four months (source: TechCrunch), Flickr’s growth looks decidedly wobbly.
Pay a visit to Quora and you’ll read a lot of anecdotal evidence of hard-core users noticing a drop in the number of views they’re receiving and a decline in community interaction. Flickr prided itself on having an active and vocal community of photographers who shared their knowledge, their feedback, their criticism, and their praise. However, Flickr’s failure to implement a halfway decent mobile platform (it only became fully responsive in April 2017), its unrenewed stock deal with Getty Images, and the rise of other social media operations such as Facebook and Instagram have seen its user-base fall away. Social sharers have gone to places with easier mobile uploading; pros have sought out sites that make selling easy.
I will admit that I never really indulged in Flickr for its photography community. I assign very few of my photos to groups and my participation in discussions is highly limited. While I might have noticed that far fewer people are looking at my photos now compared to say, five years ago, and indeed that fewer of my contacts are using Flickr to share their photos, I have never sought out feedback or affirmation from fellow Flickr users. Thus, I don’t feel as if I’m missing out on Flickr’s community element. What you’ve never had, you’ll never miss.
Why then do I use Flickr?
For a photo community as lauded as Flickr once was, you might be wondering why I chose to use Flickr and continue to do so. Mostly, I suppose, it comes down to convenience. I like having somewhere to share my photos, not for the purposes of feedback, but literally sharing. I want a central repository to which I can direct family and friends to look at holiday photos (if they so desire) or to see photos from events and occasions, for example parties or, as the weekend just passed, duck racing in the village down the road. (Yes, duck racing. It probably isn’t what you think. If you’re curious, you can check out the photos.) When I first started to use Flickr there was virtually no photo-sharing competition. Now, people still know where to look. Then there was no choice but today it remains simple.
After so many years of use there is also a degree of inertia attached to my Flickr use. Moving elsewhere would demand re-homing thousands of photos and that’s not something I’m sure that I’m prepared to do, not unless it becomes a necessity. Flickr serves me well in cataloguing and archiving my images, making them discoverable, and backing them up. I’ve also invested a great deal of my time tagging, grouping, captioning, and mapping my images. I’m reluctant to jettison this use of my time and accumulation of data. For with the inertia comes nostalgia. Flickr offers me a convenient means to chart my photographic progress as well as retrospective of my life since I joined. From Flickr I can find out pretty quickly that I was in Myawadi, Myanmar on 13 February 2014 and that I made my brother a chocolate meringue gateau with blackberries for his birthday in 2010.
It’s also good value for money. A whole terabyte of storage costs nothing. For $44.95 over two years you get ad-free use, advanced statistics, unlimited storage, and few bits more besides. I can control who looks at my photos, what copyright attributions I want, and if they can be downloaded, and there are easy sharing and embedding tools.
Yes, Flickr’s mobile interface is poor. Yes, Flickr has suffered from what can be interpreted as disinterested management and a lack of development. It failed to capitalise on its community; it pursued changes that its users didn’t need or want at the expense of their goodwill and possibly even Yahoo’s relevance and existence. But despite all of that for some of us, it remains useful.
What are Flickr’s prospects?
Flickr, however, is in trouble. Following the community’s plea to Marissa Mayer to ‘please make Flickr awesome again’ when she assumed the helm at Yahoo! in 2012, there were developments to the site. But there were some blunders, too. Mayer’s justification for ditching Pro accounts because ‘Everyone’s a photographer now’ utterly underestimated Flickr’s user base and demanded a u-turn. And where Flickr could have been a component of Yahoo!’s having grace, whether through a strong social presence or as a stock photography cash-cow, Yahoo! has been the subject of a protracted sale to Verizon and its future is uncertain. From uncertainty regarding Flickr’s continued existence to how users will be treated under the new ownership, Flickr is on very unstable ground. For all my investment in Flickr, I might have to start looking for a new home for my image library.
What are the alternatives?
I don’t want to leave Flickr. It serves my purposes. But if I have to, where could I go? There’s 500px, Google Photos, EyeEm (where I have an account and make the odd Euro selling a few photos). None of them, though offer quite what Flickr does. So I’ll stick with it for as long as I can.
Daniela Bowker
Daniela Bowker is a writer and editor based in the UK. Since 2010 she has focused on the photography sector. In this time, she has written three books and contributed to many more, served as the editor for two websites, written thousands of articles for numerous publications, both in print and online, and runs the Photocritic Photography School.
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64 responses to “Flickr is on its way out, what are your alternatives?”
Give us some suggestions please.
I’m playing around with building my own Flickr-like site, based on WordPress.
Not good. I agree the mobile interface is a major let down. But the free TB is a massive benefit to me as I also use it this share photos to family and friends, as well as another back up for my images.
It will be interesting to see what happens now that Verizon bought Yahoo!. I use Flickr and would hate to see it go because it’s currently my most used photography platform but only time will tell
It’s a shame as there is still a really useful archive of discussion threads on all Aspects of photography too – unfortunately most people left a long time ago and a lot of groups have just been abandoned – if anything I’m surprised it’s still going really!
Why do we have this doom thread every a couple of years about some Photo sharing site?
Seems people are more interested in having photos on the latest trending thing and then move on ASAP to the next “big” thing instead on focusing on the Art itself…
Who cares if Flickr is not the “best Bar” in town right now?
Thank you. Everyone jumped on 500px, and look how that turned out.
WTF!!! No way! It has been useful so far. After having a really bad experience with 500px, where they were letting other sites using my work as “public domain” and do nothing about it! At least you can diseable sharing and controling (blocking) all those images collectors who have nothing but “favorites” galleries full of porn passing for artistic works. I knew all this change to Verizon won’t be any good :S
It was a great site, it’s a shame they f..cked it up…
Thanks again micro$oft, another good service sentenced to death by the worst management of the world… bah
You do realize Flikr is owned by Yahoo/Verizon…and NOT Microsoft, right?
And who’s the owner of yahoo?!
https://www.google.it/amp/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/1D78DAD2-3185-11E6-BF64-F64DBF1C6139
Riccardo Mantero Verizon bought Yahoo on Tuesday.
In fact my photos sometimes are used for the Bing search engine cover… another crappy service by M$
Lol, did you even read the article you just posted? Microsoft did not buy Yahoo. ?
Ahahaha, you’re just a Microsoft hater with no knowledge of any real facts.
Ops! You’re right! Anyway M$ is crap…
Gordon Smith yes I am!
You would think an “Information System Architect” would be more informed about the largest tech companies.
It depends on what you do…
And may be, in my work, I don’t care at all on who owns who… In fact I’m an architect not a commercial…
Sure I hope someone decent will buy flickr…
I abandoned Flickr years ago. The communities and forums were dying, they weren’t as nice to navigate as other websites and it was flooded with poor quality photography. I don’t claim to be a great photographer, but the vast majority of pictures were uninspiring and bland.
I find more inspiration and better communities on proper forums, also Instagram, 500px and Fstoppers are full of inspiring images.
Instagram is crap. Full of posers and cheaters.
I only look at Instagram for the images themselves. Even if they are stolen pictures or heavily edited etc, you can still get inspiration from many of them.
If am definitely becoming more of an anti-social photographer rather than a social one.
Dabid Li, save those gems now!!!
Avoid 500px after all the shenanigans they’ve pulled with users images. A lot of companies are no angels but to be honest there’s not many options for image hosting these days. It’s why I’ve stuck with Flickr, than and the fact it’s got around 600-700 images from the last 12 years that track my progress through photography.
I have 2-3000 since 2008.
This is an observation/opinion piece, not coverage of an announcement. Flickr s problem seemed to come from not many people not wanting to pay the premium to go “pro”
And when you hit its limits, it became a less useful service since you had to decide what you wanted to push off in favour of new photos.
nothing from Verizon or Oath supports the idea that Flickr is going away.. but this type of fear mongering headline will surely drive your fed-up readers away :(
It’s’that’ time of year again. .time for a flickr bashing .. seriously guys give it a bone already.
“Your Flickr photos should be safe. Again, the last thing Verizon
wants to do is anger its new customers by changing access to their
photos. A Verizon spokeswoman said there are no immediate plans to
change pricing.”
from : http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-yahoo-consumers-20170613-story.html
I think Flickr should have gone the hashtagging route and fazed out groups. Hashtagging is a much more flexible way of getting your photos out there rather conscious, deliberate cross-posting to groups you never otherwise visit. That said, it’s probably too late.
You can tag. I do it all the time.
Right! Forgot about that (somewhat) later introduction. Going in with in with both feet and ditching groups, though…
Have you checked out Kwilt? I really don’t like the fact that someone else has control of my photos so I opted for a personal cloud instead. Found them through an article they wrote about Flickr: https://www.mykwilt.com/articles/your-last-day-at-flickr/
Time to create your own cloud
None of the communications I’ve received indicate Flickr is on its way out.
I switched to Instagram a long time ago, I just like the feed back and social aspect of the app. It just gives a more satisfying experience overall, especially when you get a notification and it says something like “canonglobal liked your image”. Makes you feel really good. I didn’t feel I got that experience with Flickr.
500pix, unlike Flickr requires a fee or your photos are eventually deleted…or they were when I looked at it. Google? They just seem problematic and not as flexible.
I, too, use Flickr for much the same reasons. Initially it was simply for storage and back up, then I discovered sharing with groups was kind of fun, following people was interesting and informative. I’m not a pro, so selling has never been a goal, so Flickr really has been a satisfying place for me. I’d hate to lose it.
I am an avid user of Google photos service… true not as slick as many other of the photo sharing sites and if you want to use it’s unlimited option you have to drop the resolution of the photos ( please… really we have to go into that ?) that mostly are going to be shared online ( mute statement about dropping resolution) but I know for a fact that Google photos and Google are going nowhere in the near and (so far ) far far away future( Government, military and fortune 10 companies use Google as their cloud solution). Flickr I used in the past with limited options so I’m not really concern about the disappearance of the service.
What bothers me is the sketchy and sometimes gorilla tactics these services use to appropriate themselves of our work as photographers and sell, rent, lease, or simply take advantage of our work without any revenue to our coffers.
Im reluctant to go outside of using Google photos as a simplified backup of my images, if anyone can please offer a solution or explain a service where our photos will be safe to store and if used will be remunerated… I am listenin .
frank SISSY nazario
LOL…u are so funny..DK head LoL
I still use flickr because i can’t find anything else that does what it does, it’s not perfect but it feels like a website made for photographers.
Sure other sites can do some of these but a list of things i like about it: –
Albums & collections: very easy to create and organize, makes finding things later on much nicer, just wish more people used collections though.
Tagging: Works very much like lightroom and can even pull LR tags automatically. The ability to search my own tags and narrow down by tags, flickr even adds its own ones and you can search by pre-dominant colour in a photo. I can go to a list of all my tags when trying to find all photos from a particular camera, film, place etc. very useful.
EXIF: If photo has exif data it’s clearly displayed on the page and i can click through for extensive exif data as well. If a photo has GPS data in it there is a world map there and you can quickly drill down to where it was taken.
Easily select various sized copies or the original if made available and the share button has various options for social media sites, email and bbcode for forums, very nice.
Privacy settings are varied enough and useful, public/private/friends/family, change who is allowed to comment or add tags.
Select what kind of copyright (or lack thereof) i want on photos, has 9 different options to quickly select from.
Stats page for each photo with graphs and even where the viewers came from, there is also a summary stats page where i can see various things about all my photos. The Recent Activity page as well, lets me see if anyone has commented or favourited any photos so i can quickly respond.
People page, you can see the most recent 5 photos from people you follow, makes it easy to keep up with their activity as not everyone is prolific.
Total Ka Ka
Anyone else find it kinda hilariously disturbing that the cropped image on the post says “lick?” LOL
I read somewhere else that Verizon hasn’t said anything about Flickr and the article suggested that maybe they might improve it or change it up someway
flickr really was the place, and could be again. I don’t think it would even take that much, Yahoo just never knew what to do with it after they acquired it way back when.
I made a lot of friends thanks to the groups, and was able to learn a lot about photography through them as well. It really was a community model rather than a glitzy gallery model, though they was no shortage of great work.
500px is the most obvious replacement, but I find it lacking. There’s very little interaction beyond the occasional “Cool!” comment, and their sorting algorithm leads to a parade of predictable lingerie models, over saturated landscapes and buddhist monks dominating everything. Instagram is a flood of disingenuous bots and people trying to market all kinds of bullshit next to photos of cats and brunch.
Frankly there just isn’t a great photo community site out there anymore, not like what flickr was in its heyday. Its a real shame because clearly there’s a thirst for it.
This article is as typical as anything I read, when someone want
to say something but do not have a real clue – get current!
Why look at the negative side?
Why not address that Verizon now owns Flickr? There has already been some improvement to
Flickr plus we are most likely to see more.
See that would be worthy news!
I use Flickr’s API to feed photos from my albums into my web pages. I don’t want to re-code my pages to accommodate another vendor. I’ll be with Flickr as long as they provide this service. http://mikewoolsey.com/monographDirectory.html
“FLICKR IS ON ITS WAY OUT”
Not quite yet. But I wish hyperbole was.
well it sure is now…
Still not quite yet. Think this is a good move for them.
Might’ve been a better plan to not have just shat all over their exiting users.
Glad people will no longer be able to use it as an image dumping ground, but rather have to curate and select which images are important enough to upload. If people want free image backup, they will have to limit it to their best 1,000. Not a bad thing.
I have stopped using flickr. At one point an anime picture of a teen aged girl in a bathing suit (a clp from a popular anime called card captor sakura) got tagged and reported by a community member.and all my photos got marked as restricted. I sent a help request and was told that there was adult content on my page. All the other images were screen shots, equipment shots, or buildings so I had to conclude that the anime image triggered it. I removed it and proceeded to request a review (difficult to find sub section on thier help page) and was told that there was not enough content on my page to review ( 25 images total). I added anther 25 images of equipment and screenshots. I then resubmitted my request and got no response for months and months (18 months to be exact). As a result given up. I use there to prove to people I o occasional work for that thier machines are working to spec or that I have attended a location.
I am not looking to have there photos show up to the world but do need to share them to select individuals on a recurring basis.
wow, so you use most of the article to talk about flickr and barley mention the “what are your alternatives?” part of the title of this article. You don’t even provide links to the site you suggest. Please, if your going to make your title click bait at least TRY to have something retentive in the post.
i can’t access to my flickr pro account and there is no help, the problem is caused by my yahoo id and I can’t fix. They say access to flickr to make the changes but I can’t access, they say access the yahoo to make changes but it doesn’t have the id mentioned in the error file. Here is their ridiculous message.
We’re sorry, but there’s a problem.
Here’s what going on:
Your kjstzmnel2tre76lza4kqkvvactsytztmu7vao44 Yahoo! ID uses the email address nnn@gmail.com. That email address is already associated with the nnn account on Flickr.
Here’s what to do:
If you are trying to create a new Flickr account for your kjstzmnel2tre76lza4kqkvvactsytztmu7vao44 Yahoo! ID, you need to either: (NO I TRY TO ACCESS MY PRO ACCOUNT)
Remove the nnn@gmail.com email address from your nnn Flickr account. (You’ll need to sign in to Flickr with your nnn Yahoo! ID to do this.) Or, (I DON’T HAVE THAT YAHOO ID)
Change the primary email address for your kjstzmnel2tre76lza4kqkvvactsytztmu7vao44 Yahoo! ID. (Your kjstzmnel2tre76lza4kqkvvactsytztmu7vao44 Yahoo! preferences.) (I DON”T HAVE THIS E-MAIL ADDRESS IN MY PROFILE)
If you are trying to access your nnn Flickr account, please sign in to Yahoo! again with your nnn Yahoo! ID. (I DO BUT I GOT THIS ERROR MESSAGE)
It’s over. SmugMug buy it.
What are the real options now!?
There are still troubles with their web uploader.
So Yahoo have now done the dirty on 122 million people! In its heyday, Flickr was great; now that Yahoo have bought it out, it wants more money in its pocket. One of the reasons they gave was that, because Flickr was FREE, it wasn’t considered ‘credible’ by the media. What a load of bullshit!
I shall be leaving and putting my photographs elsewhere.
Used to be free but now they become GREEDY! They are privy to my great photography work and they want to charge me for it? Lol
Because servers, bandwidth, and hard drive space are free. And all their employees should work for free too, right? /s