Flickr is a great product. Rather it was.
When Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! I thought it was the product. No, it was the people. They loved what they did. But they moved on. Catrina, Stewart and Chad moved to Hunch, Tinyspeck and Etsy also taking lot of flickr friends along with them. End result: flickr’s slow death. Flickr was never a priority for Yahoo!. Neither was Picasa for Google. I believe Photostorage and sharing should be core of a company for it to live & grow.
For photos to live, it needs people talking about it. When I worked at Yahoo!, lot of yahoos were on Flickr and there was lot of activity. 2 years after Yahoo!, I see no one commenting on Flickr photos. Yahoo! is not a social graph. Even Google+ is not (it is a ghost town)
It’s sad that flickr isn’t really social anymore. Facebook messes with image quality and hasn’t mastered photo browsing.
— Nicole Sullivan (@stubbornella) January 10, 2012
Unless there is a replacement for Facebook, Facebook is the real social graph for me (Note: Facebook’s graph was useless to me till they launched lists)
Since I have moved from being ‘pseudo-pro-photographer’, I loved Facebook for the fact that I could share photos with Family or any group of friends. Engagement is immense when the content is targeted. Another reason I loved Facebook is for the Timeline. But living the present wins against recovering the past. Probably that is why twitter didn’t even worry about giving your entire history of tweets.
Now, the problem with Facebook: Pro photographers hate Facebook. Low-res photographs, no good way to show & manage albums and no way to show public portfolio.
500px is slowly growing to be a better service, I haven’t tried it yet. But they aren’t showing the promise that Flickr did. Instagram is redefining mobile photosharing. I see myself using it when they launch their android version with friend groups. Snapjoy is nice only for the experience of seeing old photos. None of these new services allow users to move their photos from Flickr.
Flickr won’t die till people build refugee camps or Instagram/500px buys Flickr.
PS:I was non-pro before joining Yahoo!, then loved the pro features and I’m still paying for the pro account because my photos are still there. We are trying to move them to Facebook.