Flickr is celebrating its 20th anniversary. From the early days of the internet through to today, the photo-sharing site that is now home to everyone from amateur photographers through NASA has certainly come a long way.
Founded back in 2004, Flickr has changed owners several times through the years as the social media and photo-sharing landscape evolved. Here are 10 reasons why I believe Flickr is still the best site on the Web for photographers.
In a win for photo accessibility, Flickr will expand its partnership with Wikimedia Commons to upgrade its Flirckr2Commons tool and make uploading Creative Commons-licensed images easier.
Flickr is a popular resource for photos captured by people worldwide. While platforms like Instagram may have usurped Flickr as a social media hub, Flickr remains a go-to destination for enthusiasts and professional photographers to share their work.
Flickr has updated its community guidelines to combat "copyleft trolling." As described by Cory Doctorow on Pluralistic, this is excellent news for people that use Creative Commons (CC) images from Flickr, even if they make accidental attribution errors.
Flickr is planning to let photographers sell prints through a new Print Shop and is currently testing the feature with a small list of approved sellers.
Last week, Twitter announced that they were adding view counts to tweets on Twitter. I thought I’d use the announcement to very unscientifically compare the number of views one of my photos received on Twitter vs. Flickr.
SmugMug and Flickr (which was acquired by SmugMug in 2018) have announced a new nonprofit organization called the Flickr Foundation, whose mission is to help keep "billions of historic and culturally significant photographs safe, sound, and accessible for future generations."
SmugMug has acquired the This Week in Photo (TWiP) podcast and media network along with its Editor-in-Chief Frederick Van Johnson. Johnson joins Smugmug to lead what the company calls "content and new media" in addition to his continued role at the head of This Week in Photo.
Microsoft and Amazon have won a summary judgment in lawsuits that claim the companies illegally used two U.S. residents' Flickr photos to develop facial recognition software.
Flickr is adding a new virtual photography category for bulk uploading, group adminning, and search filtering in what it describes as one of its most active communities.
Despite being the world's biggest photo-sharing app, Instagram is pushing full-steam ahead with its plan to focus on Reels and "recommended" content. So where do photographers go now?
Flickr is taking a stand on artistic nudity. The company says that as the world's largest independent photographer-focused community, it is encouraging the publication of any kind of photography without the fear of bans or account deletion.
We exist in a constantly churning sea of content: there were 1.4 trillion photos taken in 2021 and an estimated 1.6 trillion shutter buttons will be pressed this year. With so many taken, where is the best place to share photos?
The photo above is of a woman named Shizuko Ina, but for nearly 80 years she remained unidentified until the staff at the Library of Congress were able to connect with her daughter and grandson.
In early August, a new photography-based subscription-only social media app hit the iOS App Store. Called Glass, it touts itself as a new, distraction-free home for photographers that is focused on one thing: your photos.
Flickr just sent an email to all of its members announcing that—as mentioned in CEO Don MacAskill's recent open letter—the price of Flickr Pro is officially going up. The price hike will help Flickr's parent company SmugMug keep the photo sharing platform alive as they continue to improve the service and (hopefully) add more paying members.
On December 19, 2019, Flickr (and SmugMug) CEO Don MacAskill posted a letter entitled “The world’s most-beloved, money-losing business needs your help.” MacAskill described how SmugMug saved Flickr from an imminent demise at the hands of Verizon, and how the company needed the photo community to step up to staunch the money-losing operation.
Flickr users received an email a few days ago asking for help to save Flickr by subscribing to the Flickr Pro service. Don MacAskill, the CEO of both SmugMug and Flickr, explained that the platform is still losing money and needs our help to keep it alive.
Flickr is in trouble... again... or maybe still. In an open letter to Flickr users and fans published on the company's blog, SmugMug CEO and Co-Founder Don MacAskill admitted that his company has not yet managed to make Flickr profitable, and implored photographers to consider upgrading to Flickr Pro in order to "keep the Flickr dream alive."
Flickr has announced that it's tripling the maximum display size for Pro members' photos, increasing it from 2048 pixels on the long end to 6144 pixels, or 6K resolution.
After learning about Flickr's new printing service last week, I decided to check the cost of prints. I want to build a physical portfolio, and have been unhappy with the quality of prints from local shops—I expect to get what I paid for (not a ton) and even then have been disappointed. So I ordered two prints from Flickr, both 8x10", both black and white.
Flickr today announced that it's bringing photo printing to all of its users, making it easy for anyone to order professional-grade prints directly from within Flickr on your phone or computer.
Lizzy Gadd is a self-portrait landscape photographer. After finding awe-inspiring outdoor locations, Gadd steps into the frame and becomes a human element against a backdrop of wilderness. Smugmug Films just released this 7.5-minute short film that takes us into Gadd's mind and work.
The US State Department is now requiring that virtually everyone applying for US visas submit their social media usernames, including those for the photo-sharing services Instagram and Flickr.
Flickr has just announced a new partnership with the image monitoring and legal-tech service Pixsy to create the world's first fully integrated end-to-end solution for combating photo theft.
Flickr will begin deleting photos of accounts over the 1,000 file limit starting on March 12th, but the photo-sharing service has just announced two changes to its policy: spared from deletion will be all Creative Commons photos and the accounts of deceased members.
After being acquired by Yahoo in 2005, Flickr became bound to its new owner's authorization system, meaning all users needed to have a Yahoo account just to use Flickr. Flickr has just announced a new login system that finally frees the service from Yahoo.
After limiting free accounts to 1,000 photo and video files, Flickr announced that it would begin deleting data from accounts over that quota starting on February 5th, 2019. Now Flickr has announced that it's giving users more time to download photos by pushing the wipe date back to March 12, 2019.
After being acquired by SmugMug from Yahoo, Flickr announced in November 2018 that it would be limiting free accounts to 1,000 photos and videos total. The major change takes effect tomorrow, and if you're over the limit, your extra photos will may be permanently deleted.
My name is Mattias Hedberg, and I'm a photographer based in Norrköping, Sweden. I was recently about to get the Flickr Pro upgrade and was hovering above the buy button when I decided to take a deeper look at the Adobe offer since it sounded a little too good. I was interested in other features of the plan also, but the Adobe one was very tempting.
Flickr announced a controversial decision this month to limit free accounts to 1,000 photos and delete extra existing photos of users who are already over the limit. Many people immediately wondered whether countless Creative Commons photos would be trashed. Today, Flickr reassured the photo community by promising that CC photos aren't going anywhere.
Yesterday Flickr made their first big restructuring announcement since recently being purchased by SmugMug. Beginning next year on January 8th, Flickr will limit free accounts to 1,000 photos. The previously offered free 1 terabyte of storage goes away.
After Verizon-owned Yahoo sold Flickr to SmugMug in April of this year, it seemed likely that changes would be coming to the service due to new ownership. Today the first major changes just took place: Flickr has downgraded its free plan and upgraded its pro plan.
Flickr has announced a major new update to its photo galleries that brings a redesign and new tools for helping you "tell your visual stories with new tools to facilitate your creativity."
Having spent thousands of hours on Flickr over the past 15 years or so, on a personal level I’ve become fairly invested in the site. To date I’ve published over 140,000 of my photographs there. I publish 40 or so new photos there every single day. It’s the primary archive of my photography work on the Internet.
Yesterday, we learned that the photo-sharing site Flickr has been acquired by the photo sharing site SmugMug. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Huge news in the photo sharing world today: SmugMug just announced that it has acquired Flickr from Yahoo, which was itself acquired by Verizon last year. This deal "will create the most influential photography community in the world," SmugMug says.
The rise of smartphone photography just hit another milestone: for the first time in Flickr's history, half of all photos being uploaded to the photo-sharing service were shot with a smartphone in 2017.
As 2017 comes to a close, Flickr has been doing some data crunching on the billions of photos uploaded during the year by photographers around the world. Today the photo-sharing service revealed the most popular pictures of the year.