The whole photo-sharing space is ripe for a massive disruptor.
Photographers and enthusiasts have been drifting away from Flickr for ages, but up until now there's been no offering that's really a suitable full replacement.
On the one side you have sites like SmugMug, which has an awesome API, detailed controls over your images... but is devoid of any of the social features Flickr users have grown to love (and loathe sometimes - YOUR PHOTO HAS BEEN INVITED TO [INANE GROUP HERE!]).
Or you have beautifully designed sites like 500px... which also has no API and forces its users to operate the whole thing painfully in manual. But it does have really good discoverability features, maybe better than Flickr.
I'm not confident that Facebook and Google+ will take over the photography enthusiasts' world. I believe that most regular people will share their pictures there (and they already do, on Facebook), but the photography community won't jump on board until there are some very significant leaps (solid API, discoverability features, more niche-specific social features).
But in any case, Flickr is feeling old and creaky, we're all just waiting for something better to come along. Honestly, I'm surprised it's taken this long.
There is one thing Flickr has going for it that can't be replaced on a feature-for-feature basis: Its community has a large number (if not necessarily proportion) of good photographers.
The dashboard is clumsy and ineffective, the whole groups system is backwards and doesn't encourage quality, the Explore algorithm can be quite nice but is too random, the "interestingness" algorithm seems to have crashed somewhere in 2007 and never changes for a given search, and the "contacts" feature has far too much friction for what is essentially a follower system... But as long as I can see new photos from the talented people I follow there, and can share my work with those who enjoy it, I'll keep using Flickr.
Here's my suggestion/plea to Yahoo, however:
The whole user experience really should be rethought with the Twitter-era follower-followee paradigm front and center. Imagine a Flickr where instead of wading through hundreds of redundant, poorly-curated groups to find something captivating, you find photographers whose work you enjoy and easily follow them. Great photos get "re-flicked" throughout the network, prolific members get added to lists that people can follow, and the whole experience becomes much more dynamic, social, and quality-driven.
It's ripe for multiple disruptors. Photos are a communication medium that serves multiple purposes, just as words do. Some photos are your portfolio. Others are your memories. They call for different interactions.
Flickr, Smugmug and 500px are very portfolio-oriented. Snapjoy and my site (OurDoings) are very memory-oriented.
Facebook and Google+ are social-oriented. They're great for sharing what you did yesterday, but awkward for nostalgia. I anticipate both the portfolio- and memory-oriented sites acting as home base, but feeding out to the Facebook and Google+ for social interaction.
Flickr, Smugmug and 500px are very portfolio-oriented
Oh, I wish Flickr were portfolio oriented.
Unfortunately they have this bizarre concept of a photostream in which you cannot rearrange the order of photos, and they happen in the order of upload and not the date on which they were taken.
Also, while logged in, you cannot filter your own photostream by public / family-only / private photos only. It can be quite annoying, since I have thousands of family-only photos and only dozens of public photos, so I have to log out to see how my photostream looks to outsiders.
You can arbitrarily reorder your photostream (not just sets, your actual photostream), and you can check the organizer to filter your photostream for only public photos.
The key is "upload date" which is editable, and determines the order.
If you don't have a tool for it, go to your set in the organizer, sort the set as you want, go to the first photo, open the edit modal dialog, and start stepping through the photos setting the upload time to 1 second after the last. When you're done, the photo stream itself will reflect the custom order.
Sets already reflect your custom order with no extra work. Some Flickr tools (of which there are hundreds) support reordering the photo stream, using this technique under the hood.
Since everything on Flickr has an API, you can do most anything you can imagine.
wow, that's awesome. I hadn't realized they had made upload date writable! This has some interesting possibilities. It is somewhat too bad that changing it will wipe out the original photo upload date, though - for photos which don't have the date taken in the exif, there will be no time history of the photo left.
All the photos you directly post to Google+ are in a "Photos from Posts" album, which will grow quickly out of control for people who take more than a few pictures. There's no chronlogical view of Picasaweb photos, not even anything like Flickr's Archive feature, which is more geared toward photo-a-day projects than toward nostalgia. You certainly don't have anything like Snapjoy or OurDoings to automatically organize a backlog of hundreds of photos.
All this is true of Facebook as well, and I think it's by design. Nostalgia is often a solitary activity. What social networks want is interaction, so they're going to steer you toward whatever's been uploaded/commented on most recently. Interaction is what grows social network usage.
Totally agreed. 500px's lack of an API is reflective of its whole purpose, it seems: after uploading photos, I had no idea whether the original version was stored. The embeds have one photo size. It's all very focused on being 'in the site' and on your 'portfolio.'
Flickr was the right 'kind of site' for me back in the day, and still works well as a photo service, not a destination. Google+ is a different kind of site - it's a 2011 socialmediaadservingconnecting site instead of a site with any focus or any emphasis on users creating content of value. The 'you are the product' feeling applies to Google+, whereas Flickr I always felt like I was paying for something of value and getting a relatively honest deal. And 500px feels less like a photo service and more like a site builder - something that doesn't fill my 'place to store all of my photos and export them if worse comes to worst' criteria.
I uploaded duplicate photos by mistake on Flickr and had to go through hundreds of photos one by one deleting them. There's no option to delete duplicates based on file name or file name/creation date etc. because Flickr has basically been dormant from a development standpoint for years.
I think you're right that duplicate detection is not a commonly-desired feature among photography enthusiasts. They generally upload a small set of carefully-chosen and edited photos, so duplicates will be uncommon.
For people with large collections of their memories, I think it's more common. That's why Snapjoy launched with duplicate detection as part of their MVP. My site (OurDoings) got compliments from a new user on several features, but duplicate detection was apparently the only feature that was capslock-worthy:
duplicate detection. EXCELLENT! Not encountered elsewhere and what a difference it makes, it means that people can dump their stuff even though they havent quite optimised/tagged/cleaned up their local stuff. It detected both duplicates in the file sets I sent (it happens with multiple computers, synchronisation, and multiple aborted organisation efforts) and when i sent files already uploaded. Removes a lot of work :)
If you're using Flickr as a carefully curated art portfolio, I agree, it's unusual and easy to sort.
If you're using Flickr as an event display solution, it's quite easily done.
I have two pro accounts with Flickr, specifically so I can shoot and present events while still leaving breathing space for my general work. By and large I like it, but there are definite issues with bulk tools and this is one of them.
I disagree. Finding and removing duplicates amoungst the 6000+ photos I have on Flickr is a PITA. I screwed up a few times and uploaded photos I didn't think I already had there.
There are many 3rd party apps in the Flickr App Garden that can make up for any shortfalls of the website.
For example, if you're uploading photos, an app like photoSync (http://webecoz.com) knows enough not to duplicate your photos. It will detect that it's a duplicate and use the copy that is already on Flickr.
I believe it may also recognizes duplicates when it's downloading photos.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned IMGUR yet - it is a fantastic img host - but the premium accounts allow a lot of flexibility. Albums, galleries - privacy settings etc.
Plus it has mobile uploaders and is super fast and easy.
At $24/year for unlimited access/features- I have dropped all others for it.
I've worked with SmugMug on some projects and I'd say they actually have fairly robust social/sharing features–they just may not be marketed well.
They have tons of social network sharing & embed features. Plus a great API. Their categories and subcategories can act much like Flickr's groups but I simply think people don't use/browse them much.
I wasn't thinking about social network sharing when I was referring to social features - I was thinking about social features within the community.
I'm an amateur photographer, the work that I do is of interest to other photogs, rarely to my "real life" friends. Flickr's Groups, for all its faults, allow me to keep up with photographers of similar interests, and they with me - no amount of "Facebook/Twitter/StumbledUpon/+1" button integration will get you that sort of interaction.
There are really two sides to this that I can think of:
- Discoverability: can you discover the work of other people easily, and they yours? 500px has a wonderful way of measuring top uploads and exposing the best work to the world in a beautiful way. Flickr has groups where you can reach out and interact with photogs of similar interests. AFAIK SmugMug has very little in this regard.
- Interactivity: what can you do once you discover interesting, good work? On Flickr you can comment, you can add to group pools (to the collective groaning of everyone, but hey), you can fave, you can give all sorts of feedback. Similar for 500px. SmugMug is not nearly so tightly integrated in this way.
It's very much organized to be individuals of portfolios, there's not a distinct feeling that you're part of a greater network rather than simply looking at a single photographer's work.
Photographers and enthusiasts have been drifting away from Flickr for ages, but up until now there's been no offering that's really a suitable full replacement.
On the one side you have sites like SmugMug, which has an awesome API, detailed controls over your images... but is devoid of any of the social features Flickr users have grown to love (and loathe sometimes - YOUR PHOTO HAS BEEN INVITED TO [INANE GROUP HERE!]).
Or you have beautifully designed sites like 500px... which also has no API and forces its users to operate the whole thing painfully in manual. But it does have really good discoverability features, maybe better than Flickr.
I'm not confident that Facebook and Google+ will take over the photography enthusiasts' world. I believe that most regular people will share their pictures there (and they already do, on Facebook), but the photography community won't jump on board until there are some very significant leaps (solid API, discoverability features, more niche-specific social features).
But in any case, Flickr is feeling old and creaky, we're all just waiting for something better to come along. Honestly, I'm surprised it's taken this long.