I really loved all the places where they snuck in "Game Never Ending" in the product, because they didn't set out to make a photo sharing product, but steered hard into that.

Flickr was the only property which was allowed their own version of PHP and despite having PHP inside, every single URL said ".gne" (Game Never Ending). I worked for the PHP team and that was my only excuse to show up to work in the SF office instead of being stuck in Sunnyvale when visiting the US.

They had all the right bits of architecture built out - rest of Yahoo had great code (like vespa or the graph behind Yahoo 360), but everything was more complex than it should be.

Flickr had the simplest possible approach that worked and they tried it before building anything more complex - the image urls, the resize queues, the way albums were stored, machine-tags, gps co-ordinates.

I also took a lot of photos to put up on flickr, trying to get featured on the explore page up front - it was like getting published in a magazine.

Every presentation I made had CC images backed by flickr, it was a true commons to share and take.

And then Instagram happened.

I was there pretty early. I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr that my Pro account upload quota was upgraded to 2GB monthly.

Made many friends via my photos, online and in-real-life. Many of my photos became pretty popular and picked (stolen a lot too) up by major newspapers/publications in India, USA, and even in Vietnam. Some even bought the original copy and rights. It was never my intention to sell my photos nor will that ever be but my guestimate is that I sold quite a lot (high single digit thousands of dollars).

I donated and gifted a lot of Pro accounts to people who asked, mostly students and thos who commented nicely on my blog. Many of my payments comes to Paypal and it got accumulated and there were no ways to get the money to India (for a very long time). So, I just used it to gift to others.

Before I stopped using it more than a decade ago. It had garnered over 10+ million views and my tenure with Flickr lasted almost a decade.

I’ve taken backups/takeout but do not have the heart to delete my account yet. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/

In the end, I just built my own photo blog on Hugo with SveltiaCMS (thanks Claude). I don't care much about the social part per se, just want a place to host my photo journeys.

Secondly, it makes use of and exposes EXIF data. I really, really lament the Instagrammification of online photography, where the only aspect ration was 1:1, terrible resolution, no EXIF data, and certainly no easy way to link a photo to anything outside of Instagram. That EXIF data makes it so much easier to search photos - although it could do with some AI autotagging. Surely that's coming down the pike...

Lastly, it's like an internet time capsule. There are accounts that started in the early 2000s and haven't been touched since the 2010s, and you can still pull full resolution imagery from there. And there are people even more old fashioned (and probably even more old) than me, still uploading new photos and old slides.

It sucks that Yahoo didn't do anything with Instagram, but I'm glad it also managed to avoid completely destroying it.

Nowadays, I have a locally hosted Immich instance. It's great as personal photo archive, but is missing the social features.

To be honest, with the advent of GenAI, I'm now reluctant to share my photos publicly because I don't like the feeling that my work will be slurped up for AI model training..

I stopped using Flickr around the time they started flirting with bait-and-switch strategies - "we'll hide / delete your old photos unless you pay" - so maybe things have gotten better... although I see that artificially-looking landscapes still dominate their "trending" page (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags).

Anyway, my general takeaway is that things are more interesting on photo sites where engagement isn't driven primarily by a global popularity ranking. You just come across thought-provoking work more often.

All of my photos are automatically synced to Flickr via the Auto uploader, and getting things from my camera to Flickr is as simple as transferring the data from the dslr to my phone, and the auto uploader takes care of the rest.

From there I can go through the photos, decide which ones I wanna make public, and organize them into my albums to share with others.

My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.

Right now, I'm using glass.photo and I actually quite like it. You have to pay, though, which is a high entrance barrier, but I feel the quality of what I see in the site is great, the platform works nicely and the community has been welcoming so far.

I yearn for a good site to share and comment photos which is a bit more open, though.

Single handedly created a lot of issues for anyone maintaining old cars…

I remember that time I reported someone for reposting my images.

Flickr's response was deleting my profile, all of my photos, and not responding to any of my attempts to contact them.

On the upside, it was a good lesson to not trust service providers.

https://github.com/cooliris/embed-wall

If you're on MacOS, you can run the file with this software:

https://ruffle.rs

This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities. In ten or so years, everybody will use it for multimedia.

Zuck purely bought it to murder competition in the crib

I'm not going to sign up for it just because he put a hard login wall ("look at how many users we have!")

He kills art, he kills organic reach, all his products turn into spam, 97 ads per real post

It's been such a tragedy that we now have such good quality cameras, yet all the media we consume is incredibly downscaled and compressed to save money.

Pretty disappointed my Pro subscription somehow increased by 60% this year. That's pretty uncool. I guess all the crippling of free accounts still hasn't reduced costs enough, or something. It's bad enough you can never see original size on free accounts anymore (even though I'm now paying $135/year!), apparently reduction in functionality that was theoretically supposed to keep costs down still hasn't prevented a continual escalation of Pro subscription cost (regardless of my minimal usage of the site).

It was atrocious.