Photos and the Changing Online Landscape

I’ve been on flickr nearly since it first started. It’s been a great community to learn about photography and hook up with others who are really into photography as well. I have 10 700 photos on flickr so I’ve looked on various flickr developments with fear because of how invested I am in the site. I was scared when Microsoft was going to buy them because they haven’t always been as open a company as Yahoo. Frankly, I wasn’t too happy when Yahoo bought flickr because they’ve been so stagnant and development did stall for many years there. I used to listen to a lot of photography podcasts and they were constantly talking about the fall of flickr because the largest photo repository online was now Facebook. There were two reasons I never put photos on Facebook. At first it’s because I wanted to aggregate all the comments and views in one place. Later it was because posting photos to Facebook was a bad deal copyright-wise.

Although, I didn’t think it was perfect, I thought the most recent change was pretty nice in that that photos got a larger screen space and more emphasis. However, when I logged in today, I saw tons of protests for the upcoming view. I don’t know how long it’ll be up so here’s a quote:

Want to know why? Please read along.

Flickr recently launched the a beta version of there new photo “experience”. Also known as; the page where you view a picture.

Oké good, so what, no problem right?

Except just a new jacket for the page they silently changed much more. They try to break up the community Flickr is. Some small changes can be seen already. Your contacts have become followers, you follow people now. They are no contact anymore, you’r supposed to just follow them. If you can’t acces the new beta you probably still miss the point I make here, so read further with me.

The new layout discourages comments in every way. Read the problems with it: - It’s impossible to make goot structured multi lined comments - Comments are moved to a very tine box at the side. -No more images possible in comments. Further failures. -Tags are replaced by a #. Words with a hashtag infront are tags, you place them in the discription. -Not possible to have HTML- or Forum links. -Not able to see who faved your photo. -A bunch more (See link beneath)

Want to see the new flickr photo page: www.flickr.com/photos/jord1/10159497355/

conclusion: Flickr wants to become a shoutbox like twitter. Some things were directly stolen form twitter like hastags and “followers” How will the future Flickr look like: www.flickr.com/photos/jord1/10171498594/

Photo’s need to be look at, not shout over. There is no place for good discussion on the new Flickr, this is sad. Photo’s have to be discussed, we all can improve our pictures and knowledge by looking and discussing the photo’s of Flickr. The future Flickr removes this place of thoughts, removes the soul of images, the story, the Shot. We’re left with Iphone pictures of people breakfasts and activity’s.

Protest, let call our voice. Post #Twickr .

I enabled the new view again (I’d enabled it a long time ago and I didn’t like it) and, interestingly, it’s similar to Google Plus’ photo view. However, I find Google Plus and flickr to have very different aims - one is for socializing and one is for the photo community.

Well, it has become the perfect time to re-evaluate the photo landscape only and how I’ll use it going forward. Up until now, I was basically using flickr for a dual purpose - sharing photos with the family and posting photos I was proud of. (Maybe a great animal capture or some great technique) Other than that, Danielle and I had decided that for really personal photos of Scarlett that we wanted to share with the family, we’d use Google Plus. I really like Google Plus’ use of Circles for limiting your posts’ visibility and not bombarding strangers with photos of your kids. Your friends and family might still get sick of seeing them, but at least they’re a more targeted audience. It’s one of the reasons I never posted all the photos I took at any particular family function to flickr.

As you know, I recently finally got an Android smart phone. I set it to automatically backup my photos to Google Plus because I don’t feel I should I lose memories just because I lose my phone. And once it’s there, it’s just so easy to share it out.

So from here on out I’m going to do the following. Photos I’m sharing between family and friends will be on Google Plus. That way everyone can look and comment without having to join Yahoo/flickr. The only photos I’m going to post to flickr are photos I’d like to share with the public because they’re clever, funny, or artistic. It should work well for everyone - both audiences will get the best of what works for them. As a plus, it reduces my dependence on flickr without requiring me to host my own solution.

• Flickr
• Google
• Google-Plus