Flickr Needs More Paying Users
In an email tonight to users of Flickr who pay roughly $50 annually for the service, MacAskill has basically asked them if they know anyone else who might be interested in a yearly subscription to Flickr, explaining that it “still needs your help. It’s still losing money.”
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To sweeten the deal for new subscribers, SmugMug is offering 25% off a Flickr Pro account for those who visit this link and input the code 25in2019.
Flickr is the world’s largest photographer-focused community. It’s the world’s best way to find great photography and connect with amazing photographers. Flickr hosts some of the world’s most iconic, most priceless photos, freely available to the entire world. This community is home to more than 100 million accounts and tens of billions of photos. It serves billions of photos every single day. It’s huge. It’s a priceless treasure for the whole world. And it costs money to operate. Lots of money.
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Every Flickr Pro subscription goes directly to keeping Flickr alive and creating great new experiences for photographers like you. We are building lots of great things for the Flickr community, but we need your help. We can do this together.
I can take a really nice picture from my very nice iPhone. And on my iPhone, I can view it how it was meant to be seen. But if I post it to a social network, it will be compressed because the convenience of delivery outweighs the full quality weight of the file.
People are perpetually complaining about @Flickr and the price increase for a Pro account.
But what Louie is describing is exactly why there is value in Flickr Pro. One of the few places that stores your original photos, uncompressed, and EXIF data intact.
Previously:
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I paid for Flickr for over 6 years, but when iCloud Photos came along I didn't really see the need for it anymore. Plus all my friends who had been on it had already left so there wasn't much to see. I feel like they kinda bungled the service around 6 years ago and never really recovered. It's been so long I can't remember what the issues were, but I remember that something happened to make a lot of users upset and the general interface sucked for a long time (it was really good in the beginning years). I think they've probably fixed most of the complaints by now, but it's the kind of service that once you lose a customer, it's hard to bring them back, especially if they've moved on and invested the time, effort, and possibly money to migrate to another service. I'm sure everyone sharing photos via Facebook now hasn't helped either.
Actually I do remember the primary reason I left Flickr -- when the iPhone camera became so good that I was taking at least 50% of my photos with my phone. I guess this was around the time of the iPhone 5S. Then the iPhone cameras got so good a couple years after that, I got rid of my Canon point and shoot camera altogether (it was basically the highest end model of P&S and it still probably took better pictures than iPhone up until the X series, but it was outweighed by convenience).
The funny thing is, I've got an iPhone 8 Plus now and I'm itching to upgrade the camera because I tend to take a lot of low light shots and I don't like the weird paint-like watercolor effect that the iPhone does when there's low light. But goddamn the new phones are $1,100+ just to get basically the same thing I have now with the 8 Plus (which was... $899 with a deal I got from Tmobile?) -- so since I don't actually care about any of the non-camera functions of the new phones, I'm going to take a serious look at current P&S cameras to see if any of them can match the iPhone for $500, and save myself $600. It might be a fruitless effort, but I'm not giving Apple $1150 if I can help it.
Flickr is a great resource not only for photos, for many years it was the best platform for the contemporary art.
Lot's of painters use it for both digital works and photos of the paintings and drawings.
This was a thriving community, but unfortunately nor Yahoo, nor SmugMug promote it or even support it with adding proper features.
But I still use pro account for my art, hoping that one day they will fix it.
>The funny thing is, I've got an iPhone 8 Plus now and I'm itching to upgrade the camera because I tend to take a lot of low light shots and I don't like the weird paint-like watercolor effect that the iPhone does when there's low light. But goddamn the new phones are $1,100+ just to get basically the same thing I have now with the 8 Plus
To be clear, that watercolor effect comes from Apple's denoising. You could use a third-party app like Halide to turn that off, but ultimately, you're better off with a big camera if you want higher-quality low-light shots.
iPhone 11's "Night Mode" shots look impressive, but zoom in a little, and you get that same effect again. The software processing just can't make up for the tiny lens.
That said, while you lose the telephoto lens, an iPhone 11 (no Pro) will be better than your 8 Plus in almost every way.
The last time I checked, Flickr was the only online photo service that let you embed your photos onto your blog, website, or any random comment you made elsewhere on the internet. I don't have the finances to pay them, but if someone wants to upload their photos, it is the company I recommend.