Photo sharing site passed around

April 22, 2018 7:22 AM

Flickr is now owned by Ludicorp Yahoo! Altaba Oath SmugMug, "acquired" in a deal for undisclosed terms. About the purchase, SmugMug's CEO states, "It sounds silly for the CEO to not to totally know what he’s going to do, but..." The Learn More page announcing the change of hands does not explain anything but it does feature photos of a food fight and clowns.
posted by ardgedee (75 comments total)

This sounds like a joke but it's not April 1st.
posted by tommasz at 7:38 AM on April 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

Good. Flickr was too good for Yahoo.

I was hoping it would be Maciej Cegłowski who picked it up, like he did with Delicious, but I trust SmugMug. They're independent, self-funded, and they've been around for ages. It's enough to make me want to sign back up for Flickr, once they fully take over.
posted by SansPoint at 7:41 AM on April 22, 2018 [18 favorites]

As tommasz said. I like Flickr, by and large it does what I need. I'm not a pro by any means though I do have the sunset era Flickr Pro sub. I use Photoshop/Lightroom. What would fellow Mefites recommend as backup site in case Flickr goes boom or the T&Cs and general usage become unpalatable?

Ah thanks SansPoint, that's good to hear. I know nothing about SmugMug.
posted by diziet at 7:42 AM on April 22, 2018

I know their name is goofy, but honestly I have a positive feeling about this acquisition. SmugMug stepped in to rescue the data of PictureLife users when that company went under -- for free! (One affected user's story was told in this Reply All podcast; it starts at around the 25min mark). I haven't used SmugMug myself, but they do seem like good eggs.
posted by halation at 7:44 AM on April 22, 2018 [17 favorites]

Don from SmugMug has been answering questions about the acquisition on Hacker News since yesterday, including a promise to an old Flickr user to "move heaven and earth" to get them their photos of their kid that are stuck behind a lost Yahoo! account.
posted by haribilalic at 7:54 AM on April 22, 2018 [15 favorites]

SmugMug has been around for a long while and many photographers use them. I like the vibe on Flickr better but I'm not worried about them as owners. It's certainly better than Verizon.

The fact that Flickr has even survived the various companies that bought and ignored them is remarkable.
posted by selfnoise at 8:06 AM on April 22, 2018 [23 favorites]

It's been so long since I've used Flickr that I don't remember what my account name is, or the password, or even if there's anything that is worth salvaging from it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:28 AM on April 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Flickr changed my life. I've spoken about it on here several times, but the short version is that I joined about a year after they launched, my wife (who's from Colorado, I'm Scottish), spotted a grainy cameraphone pic I had posted on 'Everyone's Photos', a small grid of a dozen or so recently uploaded pictures on the Flickr homepage back in the day, commented and two years later we got married. That's obviously skipping a bunch of stuff.

When Yahoo bought Flickr, it went downhill so ludicrously fast it was really disheartening. I cross-posted from Instagram for a bit, but then pretty much stopped posting there. When I saw Verizon had bought it and started getting emails about being 'part of the Oath family' I mentally wrote it off completely. It made me really sad, not just because it was where I met my wife, but because it represented to me the real promise of the early social internet. I met people I'm still in touch with through Flickr, had some incredible experiences because of it and discovered a real passion for photography.

I've let that interest and part of my life languish for ages - I don't even own a working camera aside from my ageing iPhone. But I've also started writing a blog again, so perhaps the internet of the mid-oughties is making a comeback. That sure would be great. I posted a couple of pictures for the first time this weekend after hearing the news about Smugmug acquiring the ol' place. I'm very glad that Flickr may well continue and do so in the hands of people who care about making a really good photography website, not funding rounds or vesting or IPOs. I may even go back to having a Pro account. Fingers crossed that this is a turning point.
posted by Happy Dave at 8:50 AM on April 22, 2018 [43 favorites]

This can only be good news. I'm a long-term customer of SmugMug; if you've ever clicked on a photo link of mine, you've been to my SmugMug page.

I came to SmugMug about ten years ago. The SmugMug founder, Chris Macaskill, known as Baldy, is a motorcyclist and started a forum for adventure-touring and dualsport forum called Adventure Rider, which now has 345,000 members. Baldy operates advrider ad free and free to members, just because he's a decent guy and has the means to do so. As a long-term advrider member, I joined SmugMug in order to support the man who supports my hobby community.

Chris' son Don is now the CEO of SmugMug, and he seems to be continuing his father's tradition of community-building.
posted by workerant at 8:56 AM on April 22, 2018 [19 favorites]

Long-term customer of SmugMug here also. Of all the things that could have happened to Flickr, this is among the best, because the people are good and have a decent head for business too.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:04 AM on April 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

People have gotten so used to Internet Tech Shitlords that it's easy to forget it didn't have to go this way. It would be great to have brought the SmugMug CEO in to testify as a contrast to "Dumb Fucks" Zuckerberg.
posted by benzenedream at 9:08 AM on April 22, 2018 [18 favorites]

I've been confused ever since my paid up Pro account dissappeared and unlimited photos were announced as free and now the UI is unusable for me and I haven't touched it in 4 years.

I'm ready to go back as well (been a member since April 2005)
posted by infini at 9:16 AM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I still post my photos to Flickr, but I'm reluctant to participate much there beyond that; the site is overrun with assholes who use bots to draw attention to themselves. (For example, this dude has 3.3 million likes, which would probably take decades if he were manually clicking on each photo). Most of the time, I have no idea if I'm interacting with a human being on the site or not.

The best thing by far that Flickr could do to improve itself is to limit the number of likes a user can have per day, the way Metafilter does.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 9:22 AM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Hmm, sounds like I should try Flickr. Never did before. I was interested when they first started up but as soon as they started making the rounds to Yahoo, etc. I lost interest. I just assumed one bad platform was as bad as another. Glad to hear not every company is awful.
posted by evilDoug at 9:26 AM on April 22, 2018

As someone on the HN thead pointed out:

Pinboard wound up buying Delicious. SmugMug wound up buying Flickr. Sometimes charging customers money for your service actually pays off.
posted by defenestration at 9:28 AM on April 22, 2018 [16 favorites]

Ah, the HN poster was referencing this tweet, which puts it really well:

1. @Pinboard charges money for their product and eventually buys former free-product competitor @Delicious.
2. @Smugmug charges money for their product and eventually buys free-product competitor @Flickr

We may never glean a pattern from this chaos
posted by defenestration at 9:32 AM on April 22, 2018 [15 favorites]

Maybe we'll finally get a simple, accessible exif data search within Flickr itself... it's kind of ludicrous that that feature is still missing.
posted by jason_steakums at 9:39 AM on April 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Well, it turns out that since it was bolted onto my Yahoo account way back in the day, and I remembered how to get into that, I can get to it after all. Not that there's too much there; I used it for picture-hosting when I was active on LiveJournal, so there's a bunch of stuff that I posted to scans_daily and the City of Heroes LJ. Mildly amusing, and I may save some of it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:41 AM on April 22, 2018

I always find Flickr to be really slow. Maybe I’ll give it another try
posted by jeff-o-matic at 9:57 AM on April 22, 2018

Long time Flickr user here. I hope hope hope Smugmug doesn't screw this up.
posted by doctornemo at 10:00 AM on April 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

I've been in flickr since they were in beta. I really hope this acquisition is for the best.
posted by sukeban at 10:14 AM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Is there any info on changing your Yahoo id/login? Because I would really, really like to be rid of Yahoo.
posted by jabo at 10:16 AM on April 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

jabo, in the HN thread, a plan to switch over to non-Yahoo auth is mentioned.
posted by defenestration at 10:22 AM on April 22, 2018 [8 favorites]

I've been on Flickr since 2006, and all I've ever wanted from it is to be a place online to put my photos so I can share them with my immediate family and friends (and sometimes Metafilter, which at this point I almost consider family). I've never gotten into the "social" aspects of it and never will; I hope the site continues to be that kind of place.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:42 AM on April 22, 2018 [7 favorites]

I've never used SmugMug, but everybody I've heard from who has says good things. So I'm definitely optimistic about this, because Yahoo stinks and pretty much ruined Flickr for me.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:53 AM on April 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

yes to everything everyone else is saying (omg I've become part of the hive mind)
posted by infini at 11:12 AM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I put out a query on Twitter and a bunch of very satisfied people responded as well as the official SmugMug account. I'm feeling better and better about this.
posted by tommasz at 11:28 AM on April 22, 2018

I have been waiting for someone to buy Flickr, because I think they would be a wonderful place for my wife and I to be able to comingle our picture collections, at full resolution, and sharable links, with good backups and an auto-uploader. (I would pay for a Pro account for this if it fixes the one-problem-but-a-different problem when I look at alternatives.)

I have heard good things about SmugMug, so this goves me hope.

And I think my back-up email at Flickr is a netscape.net address, which I miiiiiight have to update.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:30 AM on April 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

i finally deleted my flickr account after that massive yahoo databreach. i might have to sign up again
posted by entropicamericana at 12:05 PM on April 22, 2018

Flickr was originally developed by Stewart Butterfield's company, Ludicorp; Yahoo bought it in 2005. Butterfield went on to create Glitch (game o' my heart) and later, Slack.

I'm glad to see Flickr going to another company that looks like it actually cares about making products that improve people's lives enough that they'll pay for them, instead of trying to figure out how to squeeze money out of the aspects of people's lives that they control.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:18 PM on April 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

Well, this makes me glad I never got around to deleting my Flickr account after Yahoo took over.
posted by sarcasticah at 12:43 PM on April 22, 2018 [6 favorites]

Flickr has been so horribly mismanaged over the past 10 years or so that it's hard to imagine it getting worse. It was a very attractive service at a time blog hosting services offered a meager 10 or 20 megabyte storage space, and that would go away in an instant even with 6MP photos. When hosting became progressively cheaper and you didn't need an account for a blogging platform and another place to host files, instead of making the platform more appealing, they did the exact opposite and made bad decisions one after the other.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:50 PM on April 22, 2018

Once the transition has completed I will be destroying my Yahoo account, something I've wanted to do for years.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 1:54 PM on April 22, 2018 [11 favorites]

Heh. I gave up and stared uploading all my photos to Google Photos about a month ago, mainly because their auto photo uploader works and their site is fast and quick to search (although admittedly very feature-poor compared to Flickr - no API, no map of your photos, pretty lonely and uncared for). With this takeover, and assuming they work to bring Flickr back to life, I guess I’ll start putting my good photos back on there.

We had been struggling for years to get my wife’s 100,000 photos off Flickr onto something else. No auto-transfer method for any other photo site would work for that volume.
posted by Jimbob at 1:56 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I chuck smugmug forty bucks a year and have been doing so since LJ's photo scrapbook crumbled into the bitrot ocean - I even posted an askme about the whole thing. And you know what? I barely use the thing anymore but I'm still paying for the account because it's been nothing but solid. One year my card expired and an autopayment didn't go through and it was one of the easiest and most painless instances of internet payment silliness I've ever had to get things paid and back to rights - and all my images were still accessible by public and hotlinkable and all that stuff even though I'd gone unpaid for a few months.

I mean, I specifically didn't jump ship to flickr because they were flickr and horrific about creators and their own content. So I'm cool with this acquisition. I offer my smugmug for hosting fanart for collaborations and friends who can't afford paid image hosting and it would be awesome if the same ethos of ownership and consistency filters into a free service.
posted by Mizu at 2:21 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I’ve been keeping my Flickr Pro account alive since before the Yahoo takeover in hopes that it would eventually get better.

For me, the automatic upload of every shot has been worth the hassle, but there are a lot of end user bits that suck... for example, others can see my “collections” (groups of photo sets, for example “kid photos” and “family trips”) and albums (individual photo sets), but I can only see albums. Which is awful, because auto upload means every folder of photos on my computer became an album - and since my folders are sorted chronologically, to find “vacation 2015” I have to scroll through thousands of albums named “2018-##-##” through “2004-##-##” or thereabouts before I even get to folders named alphabetically. Which, on mobile, forget it, the infiniscroll layout will choke and die before I even get to 2014... collections exist, I can add to them, but I, the creator of the collection, have zero way to navigate to said collection short of logging out and accessing as a guest. 🙄

Have a family member who has been on Smugmug for years. He hasn’t said anything bad about it, so I have hopes.
posted by caution live frogs at 2:35 PM on April 22, 2018

Smugmug are absolutely good people and I hope this is good for them and for Flickr, which does not deserve to go the way of Geocities.
posted by edheil at 2:44 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I too was hoping that Maciej would end up buying it. I knew nothing about SmugMug until now, though from what I've heard (and from Flickr's announcement), I'm tentatively hopeful. At Verizon/Oath, it would have lingered, circling the drain, until it either got sunsetted in a cost-cutting drive or some executive decided to use it to mark his territory.
posted by acb at 3:27 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

All the endorsements of Smug Mug you guys have made convince me that this is for the best; Yahoo and Verizon seemed to do their best to kill it off. Appears it's in much safer and better hands now.
posted by diziet at 3:32 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I let my Pro account lapse last year during a minor financial crisis, but I may go back to Pro at this point. I miss the detailed stats.

Been a member since pre-Yahoo & I still miss the notes you used to be able to add to pictures - they were fun. I’d love to see those, & some white space, and a bottom of the page come back.
posted by Devils Rancher at 3:53 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Once the transition has completed I will be destroying my Yahoo account, something I've wanted to do for years.

I'd do that but I haven't found a good way to backup my Yahoo emails.
posted by octothorpe at 5:34 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

How quaint:

"you agree not to post, transmit or otherwise publish through the Services any of the following… Photos, Videos or other User Content containing nudity that would be unacceptable in a public museum where minors visit"

SmugMug terms of service confirmed as coming into force May 25th.
posted by unliteral at 6:18 PM on April 22, 2018

The Internet Archive's Jason Scott is seriously considering getting Archive Team to undertake the Herculean task of backing up every single Creative Commons image on Flickr - a significant percentage of everything in the Commons.
posted by BiggerJ at 7:09 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

That's a pretty good definition of "unacceptable" nudity, given. I'd like to see more places enforce on that standard.
posted by solarion at 7:10 PM on April 22, 2018

That person on Hacker News is incorrect. Flickr's terms of service, which since forever have allowed nudity as long as appropriate filters are applied, will still be honored once SmugMug takes over.
posted by plastic_animals at 7:47 PM on April 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

Forgot to add, here is a Flickr staff statement on the continuation of Flickr terms regarding nudity.
posted by plastic_animals at 7:51 PM on April 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

Well, maybe the impending sale is why. Flikr’s been driveing me bonkers. Auto-Uploader is cool, but it’s been on the fritz repeatedly of late. It has not been uploading things in sequence. This means having to set up manual upload. Then I get 2 of each. Hoping the change will help. I’ve used Flikr a very long time. Since maybe 1998.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 2:35 AM on April 23, 2018

The feedback here has made me reconsider my own feelings about the sale, and I feel a lot less cynical about the future of Flickr now. Thanks for the first-hand reports and links, everybody.
posted by ardgedee at 4:57 AM on April 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

> I still miss the notes you used to be able to add to pictures - they were fun.

They're back! Since half a year ago or so…
posted by farlukar at 6:33 AM on April 23, 2018

Another long-time customer of SmugMug here (more than 10 years). I barely use any features, but they're absolutely a pleasure to work with and I have high confidence in them.
posted by desuetude at 7:01 AM on April 23, 2018

Sometimes charging customers money for your service actually pays off.

This has been bugging me since I saw the tweet about Pinboard/Delicious. I've been paying for Flickr Pro for at least ten years. Yahoo! never released numbers, but all the previous times that #saveflickr has been a thing (and there have been multiple times) people who work at Flickr have made a point of saying that the service makes money. I think on the scale of a Yahoo! it wasn't ever that much money, but Flickr has always at least covered its costs, or at least that's been the public line on why it didn't need to be saved, as it were, just made awesome again.

I think the problem of Flickr for a Yahoo! was that it was never going to be a big enough revenue item to affect the bottom line on the scale they needed, and they clearly never had the sort of leadership that cared about maximizing individual business lines that measured revenues in only the tens of millions. And for the users who kept paying for pro accounts, save came to mean don't fuck up. Fucking up seemed to be Yahoo's core strength.
posted by fedward at 9:04 AM on April 23, 2018 [7 favorites]

I have a running joke with my coworkers that where we slipped into the Darkest Timeline was when something happened to cause the obviously wrong outcome of Yahoo buying Flickr and Google buying YouTube. That's where shit went off the rails.

Not sure what this says according to that theory. Good news, maybe?
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:27 AM on April 23, 2018 [6 favorites]

My Yahoo id is so old that it has a .geo on the end because it was a Geocities ID first. It became my Flickr id when they forced it. I will be happy the day I can uncouple my Flickr account from my Yahoo ID.
posted by soelo at 10:37 AM on April 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

I've been a regular user since '05, but less so since Yahoo committed itself to ruining the UI. Hopeful that SmugMug will, minimally, get rid of the clumsy auto-tagging of uploaded images.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:15 AM on April 23, 2018

There is a guy whose name is Georges Haddad, and he is the person who redesigned Flickr and then Chowhound, ruining both. Thankfully he appears to be ensconced in the (hopefully) black hole of Walmart at the moment.
posted by rhizome at 11:20 AM on April 23, 2018

I have a running joke with my coworkers that where we slipped into the Darkest Timeline was when something happened to cause the obviously wrong outcome of Yahoo buying Flickr and Google buying YouTube. That's where shit went off the rails.

That is honestly the best explanation I've seen of how we went wrong in the 2000s. Yes. I believe your theory 100%.
posted by EricGjerde at 12:43 PM on April 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

Another long-time satisfied SmugMug customer here, and I keep paying for it even though I haven't done much lately with it, just because it's solid. I signed up initially because at the time, it could do a map interface for geotagged photos and Flickr couldn't (Flickr added that a year or two later, IIRC), which I wanted. If I had been evaluating photo sharing sites a few years earlier or a few years later I might have chosen Flickr, but I'm glad I sort of fell into the site just because I happened to be looking at the right time.

SmugMug doesn't handle CC licenses as well as Flickr does though — I mean you can kind of manually do it in the caption and/or tags, but it doesn't have the nice automatic handling and search feature like Flickr does. Which is kind of understandable because SmugMug has catered more towards professional photographers, who are less likely to be interested in releasing their photos under CC licences, but if this gets SmugMug to handle CC licenses better I'd be all for that.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 1:23 PM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

For those who forgot how we got here, check out the story of how Yahoo dropped the ball and let Instagram eat their lunch (will namedropping MeFi)
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 2:09 PM on April 23, 2018

jabo, in the HN thread, a plan to switch over to non-Yahoo auth is mentioned.

I'd be delighted to round-trip that, having had to move to a yahoo ID from my original Flickr one oh so long ago.
posted by phearlez at 2:41 PM on April 23, 2018

I'm currently at 29,629 pics on Flickr!

dang, I'm only at 17000! I joined in '04 and went pro in '07, and it's basically become my cloud backup for all my photos. I always dread when I hear news of Flickr changing hands about what would happen to my photos, but so far it's been fine.

I had a Yahoo email for a while, before I made the big jump to gmail in like 2010, because I got tired of Yahoo changing the interface so often, and also my email archive was getting too unwieldy for Yahoo's search compared to Google's. But I didn't mind having to log into Yahoo for Flickr, and the process of connecting the accounts in 2005 was a one time thing that wasn't painful. And then there were virtually no changes to usability when Verizon bought them. The Flickr interface itself could definitely use some updating, but I felt like I'm so used to it by now that I can navigate and do things pretty quickly on the site. I'm looking forward to any UI improvements though, and it seems like SmugMug might be good for that.

The mobile app annoyed me at first with its limited functionality, but sometime in 2016 there was a huge update and everything is great with it now. The auto-uploader works great, and managing photos is actually pretty similar to Google Photos (no doubt they copied some of those ideas), so it all works out for me.

Shameless plug: My latest public Flickr photos are visible in my profile!
posted by numaner at 4:35 PM on April 23, 2018

I'm so glad to see this news! Have been on Smugmug for years, exactly because of the "pay for a service if you want it to stick around" thing, and have been worried about Flickr for almost as long. I really really hope this ends up being as good as it has the potential to be.
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:46 PM on April 23, 2018

They're back! Since half a year ago or so…
posted by farlukar

Seriously? Where? They've hidden them well, if true.
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:43 PM on April 23, 2018

Ah, found it -- you have to click & drag with the magnifying glass & it becomes a cursor & draws the note box.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:46 PM on April 23, 2018

"including a promise to an old Flickr user to "move heaven and earth" to get them their photos of their kid that are stuck behind a lost Yahoo! account."

Hmm. When they forced the merge with Yahoo accounts, I lost a bunch of photos of New Orleans during the Katrina reconstruction. I wonder if there's a way to get them out… except the email I had was my student one, and that got shut off like at least 5 years ago…
posted by klangklangston at 12:58 AM on April 24, 2018

Are you referring to photos that were on Yahoo photos? If so you are out of luck. Everything on Yahoo Photos was deleted years ago and there is no chance of recovery.

The problem mentioned above is with people who, because of Yahoo's screwy login/registration system, mistakenly created second accounts on Flickr and wound up orphaning their original account. Photos on the original, Flickr, account are still there but the account owners can't access them without assistance from Flickr or Yahoo staff.
posted by plastic_animals at 6:01 AM on April 24, 2018

A thing I'd really like to see them address is the stupidly easy gaming of Flickr search. I will often try to search for example photos taken with lenses I'm interested in buying, and there are users, particularly one egregious user but it's a problem with quite a few, who always paste a massive essay namechecking almost every camera and lens manufacturer in the description of their ridiculous number of photos, so they completely drown out the signal with noise. On desktop it's relatively easy, though kind of hidden, to deal with this (hover over one of that user's photos in search results, click the ... and "temporarily hide all photos from this person"), but on mobile you're out of luck. Exif search would get you partway there, and should be opened up for a ton of reasons, but I'd say at least half the time I'm looking for examples of an old legacy lens that doesn't embed exif data, so no luck there.
posted by jason_steakums at 6:57 AM on April 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's kind of amazing to remember now that Flickr was only around for 13 months before Yahoo acquired them; the site was so good during that window, and even for a little while after the acquisition. The Ux was so much better than anything out there at the time; lightweight and clean, easy (and deceptively powerful) and the sense of community was really strong; people would discover each others' photos via tagging and groups, and little circles of friends would organically form. I'm still in touch with a couple of online pals from the early Flickr days.

Even before Yahoo began actively ruining Flickr, though, there was also a scaling problem. Early on there was a window where you could actually almost keep on top of the public photo stream; like, you could reload the front page every few minutes and there might be a few dozen new photos. By the time Yahoo came along there were dozens/hundreds of photos getting uploaded to the site every minute, and the massive flood of new users meant that the signal:noise ratio went to hell as the overall gestalt went from "Flickr's clean UI makes it a nice place to post my attempts at serious photography" to "Flickr's a place to dump my entire SD card of unedited vacation photos." Photo comments got cluttered up with all those awful "You've been awarded the super awesome award of excellence" sparkly graphics trying to drive traffic to groups. The couple of groups I started became unmanageable because there were too many people joining and patently ignoring the guidelines, etc.

There was just nothing like the early Flickr Ux, before or since; it really was a joy to use and it was a wonderful way to present and share photos. I'm delighted that Flickr has finally been wrested from Yahoo and I might even start using it again, but I don't hold out much hope of anyone recapturing that early magic.
posted by Funeral march of an old jawbone at 6:58 AM on April 24, 2018 [6 favorites]

particularly one egregious user but it's a problem with quite a few, who always paste a massive essay namechecking almost every camera and lens manufacturer in the description of their ridiculous number of photos, so they completely drown out the signal with noise

Why... why would someone do this?

I just don't get people sometimes.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:30 AM on April 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

Visibility. Same reason why some people flood their instagram photos with hashtags left and right or even #tagging #every #word #on #it #related #or #not #books #travel. The difference is that being a pre-hashtag world, it used the old method of directing crawlers to a website (if you didn't know how/want to use the meta tag in the header).
posted by lmfsilva at 9:00 AM on April 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

Quite timely for me as I'd just started posting more there again, even though it did seem likely that it was only a matter of time before Yahoo MySpaced it completely. I've been uploading dribs and drabs since the start of 2005, but it never really clicked for me; but now I'm starting up a sideline doing up old film cameras to try and get more AFK time (because, horrible though it is, I do need to get out into the wilds to take test pics with all the cameras ;D).

Flickr does seem good for having a group/community for pretty much any camera ever made, as well as films/developers/alternative processes.

The SmugMug founder, Chris Macaskill, known as Baldy, is a motorcyclist and started a forum for adventure-touring and dualsport forum called Adventure Rider, which now has 345,000 members.

TIL ... probably spent more time browsing photos there as I have Flickr the last half-decade or so: all that Transalp modification porn to daydream about replicating...
posted by Buntix at 10:10 AM on April 24, 2018

"Are you referring to photos that were on Yahoo photos? If so you are out of luck. Everything on Yahoo Photos was deleted years ago and there is no chance of recovery.

The problem mentioned above is with people who, because of Yahoo's screwy login/registration system, mistakenly created second accounts on Flickr and wound up orphaning their original account. Photos on the original, Flickr, account are still there but the account owners can't access them without assistance from Flickr or Yahoo staff."

No, they were from a pre-Yahoo flickr account that stupidly has the privacy settings restricting downloads and visibility, and the recovery address is an old student one of mine that I can't get into.
posted by klangklangston at 2:33 PM on May 3, 2018

That's relatively good news as there is a slight chance you can still recover the account. If you haven't looked into this in a while go to this Flickr Help Forum topic and follow the instructions to try and recover your password using Yahoo help.

That will most likely fail but you have to go through that step before trying step 2, which is the bitly link on the Flickr Help page above. The bitly link eventually leads you to a real person but you will need a Yahoo ID.

If that fails I'd wait until Flickr gets a new, non-Yahoo, authentication system and try again.
posted by plastic_animals at 4:10 PM on May 3, 2018

numaner: "I'm currently at 29,629 pics on Flickr!

dang, I'm only at 17000! "

I'm at ...52,000+? Geez. Of course only 6800 of those are public. Every photo I take with my iPhone gets uploaded automatically...
posted by caution live frogs at 2:33 PM on May 9, 2018

I obsessively prune my photos on my phone before they could even get auto-uploaded, and if they did, I take them out from Flickr too. My usual method is take like 3-4 pics of the same photo and keep 1. I had to stop keeping them all when I realized it was a pain to manage so many photos already, I didn't need more copies of them.
posted by numaner at 11:34 PM on May 10, 2018

SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill did an AMA on r/photography.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:04 AM on May 22, 2018 [2 favorites]