Flickr was the most popular dedicated photo-sharing site on the web in 2007, and it was growing at an exponential rate in terms of new images uploaded. There was no Instagram or Unsplash around, and Flickr could have become something similar. In 2018, Flickr was sold to the relatively unknown company SmugMug, a decade after it was founded.
What could Yahoo!, the site’s previous owner, have done so badly in the intervening years? How could Instagram have risen to prominence so quickly after its debut in 2010? Is Flickr on its way out, or is it still a compelling service for some people?
A Promising Start
Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and other sites that offered news stories and indexes of recommended websites were the most popular sites on the web in 2004. Typically, user participation was limited to comments on news stories and online forums. Flickr was regarded as a pioneer of the Web 2.0 era, alongside MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, and YouTube, whose content was primarily generated by their users.
Flickr, like Facebook, was founded in 2004 by Ludicorp, which was founded by the married couple Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. The image hosting service became an instant hit due to its effective use of now-obvious features such as tags, favorites, comments, groups, sets (i.e. albums), the ability to list another user as a friend (or “family” for selective sharing), and the ability to embed photos in a “weblog.”
Flickr offered two account types: free accounts with a monthly upload limit of 20MB and Pro accounts with a monthly upload limit of 2GB for $25 per year.
Ludicorp was purchased by Yahoo! in 2005 for a sum estimated to be around $25 million. When compared to the $1 billion Facebook paid for Instagram in 2012 (much to many people’s surprise), it now appears ridiculous.
At first, it appeared that Yahooresources !’s would assist Flickr in becoming one of the largest sites on the web: in 2006, the upload limit for free accounts was increased to 100MB per month and removed entirely for Pro accounts. Alexa ranked Flickr as the 19th-largest website on the internet in 2007.
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Years of Neglect
In January 2007, Yahoo! announced that all Flickr users would be required to link their accounts to Yahoo! accounts, requiring them to provide more personal information in order to continue using Flickr. While annoying the community isn’t a good strategy, Flickr’s real problem began later that year.
When the iPhone was announced in September 2007, companies like Facebook immediately began working on mobile apps for their sites, which would be available to the public in 2008.
Fake and Butterfield left Yahoo! in 2008, whether as a result of or as a result of the company’s indifference. Yahoo! only released an official Flickr app in late 2009, giving Facebook and potentially many other companies plenty of time to become the go-to choice for mobile photo sharing.
When the app was finally released, it lacked the majority of the features that drew desktop users to Flickr over Facebook in the first place: it could only display images in resolutions up to 600 pixels wide, it didn’t include the “interesting” section, it couldn’t edit images, and it removed the EXIF data from photos when uploading.
Aside from requiring users to log in via the Yahoo website, !’s the app couldn’t create new accounts, send push notifications, upload multiple images at once, download images to the iPhone, delete images, or edit their properties.
The launch of Instagram in 2010 was a devastating punishment for Yahooneglect. !’s Instagram didn’t even have hashtags or a desktop version at first. Except for the filters, it merely facilitated the sharing of images from iPhones. With Instagram available, the improvements to Flickr’s app overtime did not appear to be exciting.
It also didn’t help that Flickr’s app had an Android version before Instagram. By 2012, Instagram had an Android version, the financial backing of Facebook, and 50 million monthly active users.
A Late Comeback
Yahoo! finally released Flickr 2.0, the iPhone app that Flickr users had been clamoring for for years, in late 2012. The “interesting/nearby” section displayed images side by side while maintaining their distinct aspect ratios, similar to the “justified view” feature that Flickr’s site had offered for nearly a year.
You can scroll horizontally for more images by the same author, or vertically for images by other contacts, in the “contacts” section. The app would load a higher-resolution version of an image when you pinched to zoom in on it. The app’s built-in camera included editing features such as filters.
In 2013, the new app was released alongside an Android version and a new 1TB storage plan for both Pro and free users. While the cost of an ad-free Pro account was doubled to $50 per year, the enhancements helped make Flickr more popular than ever. The only problem was that everyone’s friends were already on Instagram.
Flickr released an official iPad app in 2014. When Google Photos separated from the infamous Google+ social network in 2015, Flickr quickly fell out of favor, despite a quick response with its Uploadr app.
Noah’s Ark of Photos
Verizon purchased Yahoo! in 2017 and reorganized it as Oath (now Verizon Media). Flickr was purchased by SmugMug less than a year later. With fewer resources, the new owner announced that free accounts would be limited to 1,000 images, regardless of file size, and that the policy of keeping the Pro account fee at $25 per year for legacy Pro users would be discontinued.
SmugMug began deleting Flickr images of free users in 2019, with the exception of the most recent 1,000 and Creative Commons images.
According to user Frank Michel, the site lost 63 percent of its images as a result. SmugMug raised the fee for a Pro account to $60 per year in 2020, claiming that the site was still losing money.
Despite all of these troubling changes, Flickr isn’t quite as unpopular as you might think: Alexa consistently ranks it among the top 500 sites in the world, and among the top 300 in the United States.
The site appears to be maintained by an old community of professional photographers. However, unless SmugMug can sell Flickr to a larger company or develop a new and revolutionary feature, the site’s remaining years may be limited…
The Aftermath
Google Photos is today’s most popular image-sharing service, known for its ability to recognize people and places in photos and create albums of photos containing them. It offered unlimited free storage of images up to 16MP and videos up to 1080p for many years. This, combined with Google’s resources and integration with Android phones, drove widespread user adoption; however, as of 2021, it only offers 15 GB of free storage.
Instagram is still the most popular image-based social network. Professional photographers prefer Unsplash, which is now owned by Getty Images. DeviantArt is essentially Unsplash for graphic designers.
Those who want to embed images on sites that don’t store them (as Reddit did until 2016) can do so with services like Imgur, which doesn’t even require a user account. Giphy, which was purchased by Facebook for $400 million in 2020, is the leading source for GIF-style images.
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