What Ever Happened to Flickr?

In 2007, Flickr was the near popular dedicated photo-sharing site on the web, and growing exponentially in terms of new images uploaded. There was no Instagram or Unsplash around, and essentially that's what Flickr could take become. A decade later, in 2018, Flickr was sold to the relatively unknown company SmugMug.

What could Yahoo!, the site's former owner, have done so poorly in the years in between? How could Instagram have taken the lead so chop-chop later its launch in 2010? Is Flickr headed toward a virtual grave, or is it still a compelling service for some people?

A Promising First

In 2004, the most pop sites on the spider web were Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and other sites that offered news stories and indexes of recommended websites. User participation was usually express to comments on news stories and online forums. Flickr was considered a pioneer of the Spider web 2.0 era, alongside the likes of MySpace, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube, whose content was generated more often than not past their users.

Flickr was launched in 2004, simply like Facebook, by Ludicorp, founded by the married couple, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Faux. The image hosting service became an instant hit for its constructive use of features that are considered obvious today, such as tags, favorites, comments, groups, sets (i.e. albums), the ability to list some other user as a friend (or "family" for selective sharing), and the ability to embed photos in a "weblog."

Flickr had ii account types: free accounts, limited to 20MB of uploads per month, and Pro accounts, with up to 2GB of monthly uploads for $25 per year.

Yahoo! purchased Ludicorp in 2005, for a sum estimated to be around $25 million. Compared to the $one billion that Facebook paid for Instagram in 2012 (to the amazement of many), it at present looks ridiculous.

At starting time, it looked similar Yahoo!'due south resource would help Flickr become one of the largest sites on the spider web: in 2006, the upload limit was raised to 100MB per month for free accounts, and lifted altogether for Pro accounts. In 2007, Flickr was ranked as the 19th-largest site on the web past Alexa.

Years of Neglect

In January 2007, Yahoo! appear that all Flickr users would accept to associate their accounts with Yahoo! accounts, which required them to provide more personal information to keep using Flickr. While annoying the community isn't a recommended tactic, Flickr's existent problem started afterward that same yr.

In September 2007, the iPhone was announced, and companies such as Facebook immediately started working on mobile apps for their sites, which would become available to the public in 2008.

Whether it was the upshot or the cause of Yahoo!'s indifference, Fake and Butterfield left the company in 2008. Yahoo! only launched an official Flickr app in tardily 2009, giving Facebook and potentially many others plenty of time to become the go-to choice for sharing photos amidst mobile users.

When the app finally launched, it lacked most of the features that made desktop users cull Flickr over Facebook in the showtime place: it could but show images in resolutions upward to 600 pixels broad, information technology didn't include the "interesting" section, information technology couldn't edit images, and information technology removed the EXIF data from photos when uploading.

Besides relying on Yahoo!'southward website for logging in, the app couldn't create a new account, send push notifications, upload several images at once, download images to the iPhone, delete images, or edit their properties.

Devastating punishment for Yahoo!'south fail came in 2010 with the launch of Instagram. At get-go, Instagram didn't even have hashtags or a desktop version. Except for filters, all it did was brand the sharing of images from iPhones piece of cake. With Instagram effectually, the improvements to Flickr's app over time didn't wait exciting.

The fact that Flickr's app had an Android version before Instagram didn't thing much either. By 2012, Instagram had added an Android version, Facebook's fiscal backing, and 50 one thousand thousand monthly active users.

A Late Improvement

In late 2012, Yahoo! finally launched Flickr two.0 – the iPhone app that Flickr users had wanted for years. The "interesting/nearby" section displayed images next, keeping their singled-out aspect ratios, similarly to the "justified view" that Flickr's site had offered for most a year.

The "contacts" department let you coil horizontally for more images from the aforementioned author, or vertically for images from other contacts. When you lot pinched to zoom in on an image, the app would load a higher-resolution version of information technology. The app's built-in camera had editing options, including filters.

The new app arrived aslope an Android version, and a new plan of 1TB of storage for both Pro and free users in 2013. While the price of an ad-free Pro account was doubled to $50 per year, the improvements helped make Flickr more popular than always before. It only had one problem: anybody's friends were already on Instagram.

In 2014, Flickr launched an official iPad app. In 2015, once Google Photos became contained of the infamous Google+ social network, Flickr quickly fell out of favor, despite a quick response with its Uploadr app.

Noah's Ark of Photos

In 2017, Verizon purchased Yahoo!, and reorganized it under the name Oath (now Verizon Media). Less than a year later, Flickr was sold to SmugMug. The new owner, with its more express resources, announced that free accounts would go limited to 1,000 images, regardless of file size, and ended the policy of keeping the Pro account fee at $25 per year for legacy Pro users.

In 2019, SmugMug started deleting Flickr images of gratis users, except for the newest 1,000 and Creative Eatables images.

User Frank Michel estimated that the site had lost 63% of its images as a result. In 2020, SmugMug increased the fee for a Pro account to $threescore per year, saying that the site was still losing coin.

Despite all of those concerning changes, Flickr isn't quite as unpopular as y'all may remember: it's constantly ranked by Alexa amongst the top 500 sites globally, and amidst the elevation 300 in the U.S.

It would appear that an old community of professional photographers is keeping the site live. Unless SmugMug tin can sell Flickr to a bigger visitor or come with a new and revolutionary feature, however, the site'south remaining years may be few...

The Aftermath

Today, the most popular prototype sharing service is Google Photos, known for its power to recognize people and places in photos and create albums of photos containing them. For years, information technology provided unlimited free storage of images up to 16MP, and videos up to 1080p. This, combined with Google's resources and integration with Android phones, drove user adoption to the masses, nevertheless every bit of 2021 it now simply provides 15 GB of storage for gratuitous.

Instagram remains the most pop social network based effectually images. Professional photographers tend to prefer Unsplash, now owned by Getty Images. DeviantArt is basically Unsplash for graphical artists.

Those who want to embed images on sites that don't store them (like Reddit was until 2016) use services similar Imgur, which doesn't even crave a user business relationship. The leading source for GIF-style images is Giphy, purchased by Facebook for $400 1000000 in 2020.

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