Flickr Sure Looks Different

<p>I clicked on to Flickr to ck out something, and wow, it sure looks and acts different. Why don't they let people know when they have a major redesign coming? Fortunately I don't use them for my photos anymore, but I suspect a lot of people are not going to be happy with this change. What was wrong w/ it before?</p>

<p>One of my pet peeves is having to look at so many bad photos on flickr just to find a decent one. I sorta suspect that people just dump their entire memory card there w/ no editing, but I've also seen many, many bad snaps from uploaded film images too. Often it's one person doing this, but not always. Maybe this change will make that part better, but everything takes forever to load now.</p>

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<p><em>"One of my pet peeves is having to look at so many bad photos on flickr just to find a decent one."</em></p>

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<p>Steve, I find that joining a Flickr group will at least filter photos to ones preferred genre and likely come up with bunches of good ones; depending on the groups you join, of course. <br>

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For example the Astrophotography group has over 10,000 members and over 70,000 photos; most of them pretty damn good:<br>

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/astro_photography/pool/">http://www.flickr.com/groups/astro_photography/pool/</a></p>

<p>Or try the group "Bending Light"; you'd be hard pressed to find a bad picture:<br>

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/bendinglight/pool/">http://www.flickr.com/groups/bendinglight/pool/</a></p>

<p>The problem with joining a group, any group, is that you are inadvertently filtering out others...What if you don't want to filter out certain types of pictures. This is the problem I have with these sites, Youtube, Flickr, Pandora, Spotify etc, etc...Is the very notion that you have to filter out and discriminate. They do work in the sense that you'll find whatever you are looking for (for the most part), but you will also leave out others that you will never see, just because they were filtered out by some algorithm...</p>

<p>Or these so called groups. What if there were a great photographer, but not in any group...Would s/he just be completely (or there about) ignored?</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Leslie, it should be quite clear that a perfect system can't possibly exist for any site the size of Flickr.</p>

<p>The creation of groups is at least one order better than trying to find good pictures here by searching tags. </p>

<p>The new look is great, it looks like they found the 21st century. And no problems with loading.</p>

 

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<p>What if there were a great photographer, but not in any group...Would s/he just be completely (or there about) ignored?</p>

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<p> <br>

Lots of people look for photos with criteria that have nothing to do with being "great." </p>

<p>I'm not crazy about the new layout, but I don't upload as often to flickr as in the past so it's no big deal. Even in curated forums like The Hardcore Street Photography forum I see photos that I think are bad, but what do I know? There are so many sites now for folks to upload photos to that it's hard to keep track of them all. It's been suggested to me over the years that I should get my own website going so maybe now is the time to seriously consider it.</p>

<p>That's probably the way to go Marc. A photographer friend once told me that his site ends up costing him about $100 a year, which is pretty cheap. I looked at it and it's very minimalistic. It would be nice to be Lord & Master over the content too. But what keeps me from doing anything like this, besides the fact that I'm already in front of a computer far too much already, is this: not one photographer I've ever talked to has made one dime from sales from their website. Of course, some people do, I just have never met one. If you're running a site to express your views and show your photos, then this is a non issue. However, web sites take time to put together, and time to maintain. I prefer my time and money to go towards the actual photography work. Or for wine and pizza. Either way is OK with me :)</p>

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<p>not one photographer I've ever talked to has made one dime from sales from their website.</p>

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<p> <br>

Smart photographers know that websites are marketing tools, not sales tools.</p>

<p>Your choice is generally between being lost in a giant website like Flickr, with lots and lots of competition but vast amounts of traffic or being lost on the internet with nobody ever finding your website and very little traffic.</p>

<p>If you are looking for exposure I'm not sure which is best.</p>

<p>And yes, there are people who have made sales from websites. I know quite a few. I don't know anyone who makes a living at it, but I'm sure there are some who can.</p>

<p>It's not really a drastic change, imo. However, it did seem a tad sluggish which I doubt is attributable to the the new format/look. I use both Flickr and Smugmug but I rather doubt I'll renew my Smugmug account. I've been quite pleased with the sense of community I get from Flickr. Yes, it's a pretty dang <strong><em>big</em></strong> community but it still has a good feel.</p>

<p>Love the new look. About time that Flickr updated it - it has become dated.</p>

>>>web sites take time to put together, and time to maintain. I prefer my time and money to go towards the actual

photography work<<<

 

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me vast majority of time goes into shooting, selecting, and processing my best work.

Once I assemble collections of my best images, uploading them to my website is not time consuming. It would take the

same amount of time if I were using Flickr unless I wanted to use the shotgun approach mentioned above.

<p>I am glad I never went to flickr or those other sites</p>

<p>In my case since I have no desire to sell my work and I have no desire to seek work as a weekend-for-hire photographer, there really isn't any good reason I can see to upload my pictures at all. I just think it's kind of fun to be able to do so and I enjoy looking at other work from street shooters like myself even if they are on the other side of the globe. Besides, a couple of photographers have mentioned to me that they find inspiration in my work which is a nice thing to hear. In fact most of my uploads are on facebook since a number of local photographers as well as some of my out of state relatives and some of my long time friends are on my contacts and they are the ones who I would expect would get the most pleasure from viewing my work since they know me personally.</p>

<p>Oh great! Flickr finally got the bright idea to fill up all that wasted blinding white negative space they call my Photostream page by enlarging (and sharpening? NICE!) my gallery thumbnails, though some white space would be a relief on the eyes. My thumbnails look a lot better than before for sure.</p>

<p>Now I have to find where they put the rest of the interface options/actions like "Show EXIF/ Delete/Tag/Edit Name" for each image. That was one handy feature about the old layout. It was all there in one place under each image, not hidden away under some obscurely named menu.</p>

<p>Not sure about this but I'ld think if you wanted to just get your images seen by a wider audience and show up in a google image and regular search, a YouTube slide show with the appropriate tags might do the trick. I've come across some of the most unknown videos on a wide range of subjects come up in a Google & YouTube search garner at least 6000 views some with lengthy comment sections.</p>

<p>A nicely put together photo gallery slide show with some zoom/pan/scan movie effects and decent music might grab quite a bit of eyeballs. I see more "seeable/verifiable" activity on YouTube than anywhere else on the web excluding AVS, Anandtech, CandlePower & Hard Forums discussion forums.</p>

There are different uses for each photo sharing site. I use Flickr as a repository of all my images and just keep private

until I finish culling through images and share my work to select groups for critiques.. I use 500px to show off my best

work.

<p>I have started using Flickr, several times, and stopped after a while. Maybe, because I do believe that there are "great" photos out there, and that Flickr is filled up with shots, that do not catch my eyes. I agree, that some groups are more interesting than others. I'll look into the "Bending light", that Michael refers to. Sounds interesting.<br /> <br /> Surely photos are sold from websites, but maybe much less from sites like Flickr or PN. Go to a site like Saatchionline where numerous photographers sell their photos and images (as well as paintings, sculptures, installations etc), as originals or prints, me included. There are others like it. Surely, only a few live of it !</p>

<p>It might in fact be an idea for Photonet to set up a special "forum" for photos for sale with prices and sales conditions.</p>

<p>Emily Dickinson wrote that "The Soul selects her own society/Then shuts the door." That is what you have to do with Flickr--and photo.net for that matter.</p>

<p>I use Flickr for location searches. The new look gets me more images more quickly and without having to wait whilst the page turned every couple of minutes. I don't much like black backgrounds though.</p>

<p>One trick that I've found to finding good images on Flickr is to check the Contacts of people that post images that you like. Generally you'll find that their Contacts have similar sensibilities. Also, spending some time searching for Groups that address topics or genres that you like will yield fruit.</p>

<p>Another thing to do is search for Subjects that are interesting you and the elect to display them by "Interestingness" which will show first, those with the most comments, faves and views. Look further into the Photostreams of the ones that you like and make the best into Contacts.</p>

<p>There are some extremely talented photographers on Flickr and the like-minded tend to group together and share a lot of interaction.</p>

<p>They are offering 1T of server space for pro users so you can store all your photos at full resolution.<br>

Quite apart from that fact that I shoot over 1T per year, I don't feel inclined to risk it thank you.</p>

<p>I always found the white empty space (or text irrelevant to the image on view) on flickr to be annoying. Now the showing of mostly the images is default and the other content (and empty space) secondary, which is a great improvement. Slow downloads are a drawback I guess, but it's not that bad. I'm so far quite happy with the new look.</p>

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<p>They are offering 1T of server space for pro users</p>

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<p> <br>

This is incorrect. All users get the 1TB. If you were already a pro user, you get unlimited storage. However, there are no new pro accounts.</p>

Flickr is good for sending photos. At my niece's wedding last week she asked me to send her copies of the photos I was taking. In the old days of film, I would have taken the film to the lab, asked for double prints and sent her those. Shooting digital, I considered loading the photo images to a flash drive and sending her that. Easiest was Flickr. I uploaded the photo images as a set and emailed her the URL link to the set.

 

I have my own web page but it takes a good deal of time to organize, create HTML code and upload edited photos. Creating a travelogue of a trip to China took several days. My web site directory has several thousand photos which makes it hard to find a single photo.