What Ever Happened to Flickr?

In 2007, Flickr was the well-nigh 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 accept go. A decade later, in 2022, Flickr was sold to the relatively unknown visitor SmugMug.

What could Yahoo!, the site'due south former owner, accept done then poorly in the years in between? How could Instagram have taken the lead then quickly after its launch in 2022? Is Flickr headed toward a virtual grave, or is it nonetheless a compelling service for some people?

A Promising Start

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 ordinarily limited to comments on news stories and online forums. Flickr was considered a pioneer of the 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, just like Facebook, by Ludicorp, founded by the married couple, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina False. The image hosting service became an instant striking for its effective use of features that are considered obvious today, such as tags, favorites, comments, groups, sets (i.e. albums), the ability to list another user as a friend (or "family unit" for selective sharing), and the ability to embed photos in a "weblog."

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

Yahoo! purchased Ludicorp in 2005, for a sum estimated to be effectually $25 meg. Compared to the $1 billion that Facebook paid for Instagram in 2022 (to the anaesthesia of many), it now looks ridiculous.

At first, it looked similar Yahoo!'s resources would help Flickr become i of the largest sites on the web: in 2006, the upload limit was raised to 100MB per month for costless accounts, and lifted altogether for Pro accounts. In 2007, Flickr was ranked as the 19th-largest site on the web by Alexa.

Years of Neglect

In January 2007, Yahoo! announced that all Flickr users would take to acquaintance their accounts with Yahoo! accounts, which required them to provide more personal data to keep using Flickr. While annoying the customs isn't a recommended tactic, Flickr's real problem started afterward that same year.

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

Whether it was the effect or the crusade of Yahoo!'southward 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 go the go-to choice for sharing photos among mobile users.

When the app finally launched, it lacked most of the features that made desktop users choose Flickr over Facebook in the first identify: it could only show images in resolutions up to 600 pixels wide, it didn't include the "interesting" section, information technology couldn't edit images, and information technology removed the EXIF data from photos when uploading.

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

Devastating punishment for Yahoo!'southward neglect came in 2022 with the launch of Instagram. At first, Instagram didn't even have hashtags or a desktop version. Except for filters, all information technology did was make the sharing of images from iPhones piece of cake. With Instagram around, the improvements to Flickr's app over time didn't wait heady.

The fact that Flickr'southward app had an Android version before Instagram didn't affair much either. Past 2022, Instagram had added an Android version, Facebook's financial bankroll, and l million monthly active users.

A Late Comeback

In late 2022, Yahoo! finally launched Flickr two.0 – the iPhone app that Flickr users had wanted for years. The "interesting/nearby" department displayed images side by side, keeping their distinct aspect ratios, similarly to the "justified view" that Flickr'due south site had offered for almost a year.

The "contacts" department let yous roll horizontally for more images from the same writer, or vertically for images from other contacts. When you pinched to zoom in on an image, the app would load a college-resolution version of information technology. The app's congenital-in camera had editing options, including filters.

The new app arrived alongside an Android version, and a new programme of 1TB of storage for both Pro and free users in 2022. While the cost of an advertizement-gratuitous Pro account was doubled to $50 per twelvemonth, the improvements helped make Flickr more pop than ever before. It only had i problem: everyone's friends were already on Instagram.

In 2022, Flickr launched an official iPad app. In 2022, in one case Google Photos became independent of the infamous Google+ social network, Flickr quickly vicious out of favor, despite a quick response with its Uploadr app.

Noah's Ark of Photos

In 2022, 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 limited resources, announced that costless accounts would become limited to 1,000 images, regardless of file size, and concluded the policy of keeping the Pro business relationship fee at $25 per year for legacy Pro users.

In 2022, SmugMug started deleting Flickr images of free users, except for the newest i,000 and Creative Eatables images.

User Frank Michel estimated that the site had lost 63% of its images every bit a result. In 2022, SmugMug increased the fee for a Pro account to $60 per year, maxim that the site was still losing money.

Despite all of those concerning changes, Flickr isn't quite as unpopular as you may retrieve: it's constantly ranked past Alexa among the pinnacle 500 sites globally, and among the elevation 300 in the U.S.

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

The Aftermath

Today, the well-nigh pop paradigm sharing service is Google Photos, known for its ability to recognize people and places in photos and create albums of photos containing them. For years, information technology provided unlimited free storage of images upwards to 16MP, and videos upwardly to 1080p. This, combined with Google'south resources and integration with Android phones, drove user adoption to the masses, yet as of 2022 it now merely provides xv GB of storage for free.

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

Those who desire to embed images on sites that don't store them (like Reddit was until 2022) utilize services similar Imgur, which doesn't even crave a user account. The leading source for GIF-style images is Giphy, purchased by Facebook for $400 million in 2022.

TechSpot's "What Ever Happened to..." Series

The story of software apps and companies that at one betoken hitting mainstream and were widely used, but are now gone. Nosotros comprehend the most prominent areas of their history, innovations, successes and controversies.