Internet Photography Sites

You will see from my links that i still use Flickr. In fact, i first used Flickr about 13 years ago, and have made and deleted a few profiles on there as my photography changed over the years.

There was a time when Flickr was really the only photography site worth using. However, things changed.

After it’s initial launch in 2004, it rapidly became the place to be for photographers. You could upload hundreds of pictures, link them to your fancy new social media sites, join groups, add tags and import huge amounts of technical exif data to share. There was a buzz about it. I remember when i first joined it around 2011 it felt like all the best photographers were there. I was shocked by how good some of the pictures being posted were. Even my own pictures did well, i got loads of comments, messages, support and advice, it was an exciting and welcoming place to be.

Over the years though, new sites appeared, most importantly, Instagram. With the simultaneous rise of smartphones and popularity of Instagram, Flickr appeared to be in trouble. For many photographers, Instagram had a much wider appeal than Flickr. Whereas Flickr was mostly only for photographers, Instagram was for everyone and suddenly you had a huge opportunity to grow your audience and gain more work or sales.

Around this time smartphone cameras were improving rapidly, opening up a whole new world where people could take a snap with their phone, apply a quick filter, upload it to Instagram, and get instant feedback and reaction. This was all done pretty much seamlessly. Technically you could do the same with Flickr but not as easily, plus only other photographers would see your Flickr post, whereas most of the planet could now witness that exciting picture of your breakfast or shin bruise.

Then along came sites like 500px and Viewbug, plus things such as Tumblr, Deviant Art and others, all offering image hosting and eating at Flickr’s userbase.

500px in particular stole Flickr’s thunder. I remember the time when all of the “good” photographers either left or stopped posting so much on Flickr as 500px was the more prestigious place to be. They would boast about appearing on the curated front page feeds, or how the level of feedback was so much more sophisticated than what flickr would give them. This happened to the extent i actually felt intimated about moving to 500px, since it seemed to be more for the cream of the crop professionals, and not an amateur like me. Oddly, they did all end up back on Flickr, so the grass maybe wasn’t that much greener.

And what was Flickr doing to combat and fight back against these new challengers? Well, nothing really. Unfortunately Flickr, just when it needed to get it’s act together the most, went through a torrid time. It suffered serious lack of investment and was burdened with so much baggage during it’s late era Yahoo ownership (who bought the site in 2005) that many of it’s users gave up and left. Initially the Yahoo period was good and saw some worthy developments, but as time went on and Verizon ended up with many of Yahoo’s assets, the decline accelerated and Flickr fell, or so it seemed, by the wayside.

But, things were happening that caused a few surprises. Instagram, which had become the main place for almost every photographer, began to change. The algorithm started to hurt rather than help photographers, there was a focus on influencers rather than users, video content was given more of a visibility push, fake followers and cheats and scammers were everywhere.

Suddenly Instagram was not the happy place it once was, certainly it was no longer primarily a site for photographers.

500px, the previous main web based competitor to Flickr, was sold to a Chinese company a few years ago. This seemed to cause huge anger, with complaints about support and an (apparent) influx of bots, combined with a lack of any real community or engagement. A number of photographers left and never returned. I did used to have an account on 500px, but i never quite connected with the site, it could feel a bit cold and getting any sort of comment on your work was very rare.

Even the likes of Tumblr, Deviant Art and others, lost relevance during this period and were no longer seen as useful to serious photographers.

Throughout all this, Flickr was still there. Smugmug bought Flickr in 2018 and promised new investment and development. Whereas some improvements did take place, overall much of the Flickr infrastructure remained the same as it was. The phone app was still limited, the site functions still stuck in 2015 internet era.

The most important thing though was that a large and active community of photographers stuck with Flickr through all these ups and downs. Much to people’s surprise, Flickr survives.

If you read through posts on X or Reddit, you will often see discussion around “Is Flickr dead”, followed by quite a number of people who will say no, and in fact it might actually have the chance to grow again. Despite the lack of modernisation, it is still a great site for posting photos and getting feedback. It is easy to use, has a lot of great features, good image quality (unlike the dreaded Instagram compression) and if you are prepared to put in a bit of effort to grow your audience, you will get great feedback and engagement on your posts.

Could we see the return of the internet photo King? Maybe. With X being basically useless for photographers (it was ok years ago, but no one seems to use it seriously these days apart from Japanese photographers), Instagram being so full of negatives that it’s just not worth it any more, and the likes of 500px being a wasteland, then Flickr could just emerge victorious from the ashes.

I would love to see it become mainstream popular again. If i was to offer advice, i would say they need to clamp down on the AI and second life images. Not to stop people posting them, but to keep them in their own bracket and not let them overrun groups everywhere. They also need to refresh the site, it looks quite dated in many places and is a little off putting to new users.

Mostly, it needs a marketing push. So many people have forgotten it exists. For all those disillusioned Instagram and X users, Flickr is a natural home. It is still the best photography site on the internet, certainly it has the best community, it’s friendly, interesting, full of wild and crazy users that still post the most random of things, and also some of the best photography you will see anywhere on the internet, it’s such a melting pot of all sorts of things. I truly hope that the site lives on for years to come, maybe even grow a little.

Long live Flickr.