As someone who joined Flickr back in 2003 pre-Yahoo and has been on the site pretty much daily since then, I thought I’d share my own thoughts on what this acquisition might mean for Flickr users and the larger Flickr community.
No one has perspective on Flickr like Thomas. Go read his entire post.
I joined Flickr shortly after Thomas in 2004. I can’t believe it has been 14 years. Wow.
I was a prolific user of Flickr in its early days. Since I wasn’t yet very serious about photography (lets face it, I’m still such a newb) it served as more of a photolog + community for me in those early Web 2.0 days. I could post something there – say, a screenshot or my desk setup – and get a slew of comments and views.
It was also an excellent development playground. Their API, developed by now Slack’s Cal Henderson, was a boon for Web 2.0 type applications. I built many tools that used this API and cut my teeth as a still budding entrepreneur. One of my favorite projects I worked on was a Mac OS X Dashboard Widget called Flickit. It allowed you to interact with your Flickr account within a Dashboard Widget. Such a fun thing to work on.
Serious photographers still use services like Flickr, 500px or SmugMug to post high-resolution images of their work, create albums, sell prints, etc. But they also use Instagram for exposure. And they likely use a blog or Twitter or Facebook Group to interact with their community. At the time, Flickr was all of these things in one.
Today, if you were to sign up to Flickr and begin sharing your photos you’d likely carve out an audience of fellow photographers but you wouldn’t find “other” people there. And you likely wouldn’t reach a younger demographic at all. They are all on Snapchat and Instagram.
I have no idea what the future of Flickr is. The general consensus seems that SmugMug is a great company to take over stewardship of the platform. Flickr needs to exist in perpetuity in my opinion. Even if no one ever signs up to it again it stores an amazing amount of history and web history. I really hope it is preserved well.
