A History of Flickr

Ant writes "USA Today has an interesting look back at how Flickr was born. From the article 'Caterina Fake knew she was on to something when one of the engineers at her Vancouver, British Columbia-based online game start-up created a cool tool to share photos and save them to a Web page while playing. "It turned out the fun was in the photo sharing," she says. Fake scrapped the game. She and her programmer husband, Stewart Butterfield, transformed the project into Flickr. In less than two years, the photo-sharing site -- now owned by Internet giant Yahoo! -- has turned into one of the Web's fastest-growing properties.'"

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[mc bean]

Yea, because there aren't any voyeurs on the internet.

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[permaculture]

Yet the audience isn't trapped in a dark room. People only view Flickr if they want to.

You can put up a photo and sent the URL to your friends. Unlike many other photo sharing sites the viewer doesn't have to join. By default every photo is viewable by anyone, though you can restrict this if you wish.

Flickr is great for photographers. If you're a keen photographer working only in black and white, or in macro or whatever, you'll find photographers to share your work with. Every photo can be given descriptive

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[Dance_Dance_Karnov]

there is a certian 'je ne sais quoi' that B/W has. And IMO you lose that if you take a color picture and make it b/w. Just isn't the same.

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[ExampleUserAccount]

Good source images and judicious use of photoshop features can produce very good b&w from color images. The main trick is to use a channel mixer adjustment layer instead of just converting the image to greyscale.

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[FLEB]

Or to... uh... y'know... shoot black and white.

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[Omestes]

Err... I think your missing the point. Taking a photo is about skill, and most real photographers despise photoshop, and only use it to ajust contrast, levels, etc... And then, only grudgingly.

One of my friends is a freelance photographer, and he will spend an hour and a half setting up a shot with his light meter, when most of what he is setting up for could be worked out in photoshop in ten minutes, but he would rather have the feeling of doing art, and not something that any slob could do in 10 minute

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[typical]

there is a certian 'je ne sais quoi' that B/W has.

Snobbery? :-)

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[MikeBabcock]

Or you can do tags within your own photos, so to see my photos of the Toronto International Auto Show [flickr.com] recently, you could go to:

http://flickr.com/photos/mikebabcock/tags/autoshow [flickr.com]

Those photos are also parts of the "autoshow" groups and one in the "cadillac" group, where others have put together photo albums as a collaboration effort.

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[afaik_ianal]

That's a pretty bad analogy ;)

Re:It's today's version of the slide projector

[JanneM]

For me flickr is a really good way to put up pictures I want to link to without having to put up my own server (which is an administrative hassle in any case, and impossible for me in my current circumstances). I don't have to worry about bandwidth limitations, backups, DNS issues, ISP/web hotels and so on.

Mailing address

[XanC]

She lives on 123 Fake Street.

Email address

[BadAnalogyGuy]

You can reach her with comments at [e-mail]

Re:Email address

[typical]

Somewhere, the poor schmuck that owns bar.com has been probably getting years of spam at that address.

Flickr alternative in case you really need control

[Wayne_Knight]

I've never used Flickr, but I have been using Gallery [menalto.com] now for about 6 months. It's Open Source, based on PHP and MySQL. I've had to do two complete machine moves in that time, and it's handled them both flawlessly.

I think of all the image organization programs and services I've used (and there's a whole lotta them!), Gallery has brought me the most pleasure. I had more or less put down my digital camera, because I found sharing, storing and cataloging photos publicly too much of a pain. Being able to shar

Re:Flickr alternative in case you really need cont

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to let you know how impressed I am by the photo of you and your team [quality-vectors.com]. It's so professional and I've never seen that sort of photo before. It makes your website look professional, sensible and reputable. Perhaps what is most striking is how it doesn't look stupid at all. In fact the first thing I said to myself was "now there's a business team photo that doesn't look at all like it's a fake stock photo, not a tiny bit, rather it looks like an impromptu shot of the team hard at work, or else at an

Re:Flickr alternative in case you really need cont

[NilObject]

Flickr isn't really about the "image hosting" part of it - it's about the social aspect of it. Putting pictures in pools, commenting on people who take pictures with the same camera you do, finding photographers you like and can gain inspiration from, sharing photos with friends, and so on.

Gallery 2 is a great piece of image organizing and hosting software, though. It's just missing the social aspect that Flickr has.

Re:Flickr alternative in case you really need cont

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never used flickr but I'll comment on how great another service is. And then get modded up +5 Informative! Give me a fucking break!

Re:Flickr alternative in case you really need cont

[PerlDudeXL]

You can't compare Gallery to Flickr.

Gallery is nice, but ...

a) Gallery without ImageMagick available sucks sucks sucks. My webhoster doesn't provide ImageMagick and the scaled down images made with the built-in GD look blurry. Flickrs photo scaling is worldclass. The scaled down images look clear and sharp.
b) Only you and a few other people know about your site unless you some famous internet personality.
c) Gallery is an photoalbum application while Flickr is a social photo sharing service.
d) Gallery2 seems

Re:Flickr alternative in case you really need cont

[feldsteins]

I went from a staunch Gallery user to Flickr Pro. Gallery is great and maybe is still the first choice for lots of folks, but not me. In addition to all the features they have in common, Flickr can show latest photos on blog, can publish photos sent via email, can receive camera phone pics, can blog photos sent by email/camera phone, integrated creative commons licensing, supports notes on pics, can link to friends, makes awesome use of metadata tags, and is a great way to find other people's photos. Fli

Re:Flickr alternative in case you really need cont

[g0at]

Personal plug: I've been developing my own alternative photo bloggy thing [myselfmusic.com] in PHP (ad hoc'ly called Pho Bo Blog); although I am currently my only user, I'm eager to share/extend/develop according to the needs of any other interested parties.

-b

Re:wth

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Try using the left mouse button.

Re:wth

[TubeSteak]

I use the Tab and Enter keys you insensitive clod!

Re:wth

[Uber Banker]

Try using the left mouse button.

Which one?

Re:wth

[staticsage]

No.

As a regular flickr users...

[CrackedButter]

I've come to realise that only 5% of the site is unsafe as well, mostly to do with porn not being porn but a man wearing suspenders over his legs and face squatting in disturbing poses.

Re:As a regular flickr users...

[Firehed]

Just because it's not your kind of pr0n doesn't mean it's not getting someone off. Now exactly who that someone is really needs to be kicked off the face of the internet, but that's beside the point.

Re:The only thing wrong with Flikr is...

[CdBee]

Yahoo are making a right mess of things already, there's a real disprespect for original users who refuse to use a yahoo account, see this flickr group [flickr.com] for some examples

Re:The only thing wrong with Flikr is...

[advocate_one]

it could have been worse though... they could have sold out to MSN... and then everything you upload has it's copyright automatically assigned to Microsoft...

Re:The only thing wrong with Flikr is...

[General Wesc]

Actually, that's what Yahoo! did when they bought Geocities.

Re:The only thing wrong with Flikr is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Flickr is a classic "flip it" company. A killer site with no workable revenue model as an independent company. It could not survive on its own (1GB/mo upload, no limit download? Hello, insane storage and bandwidth costs!).

It could only be successful as an offering from a company that had other ways to make money. Thus the Yahoo purchase.

Re:The only thing wrong with Flikr is...

[FLEB]

And any other piece of webspace is any different?

Re:The only thing wrong with Flikr is...

[generic-man]

Mind telling me what's so awful about that? It's not like it takes a long time to register a Yahoo! account. It's not like you have to provide any real information to create one.

If the idea of single sign-in worries you, then I don't know where you can go -- Google's on board [google.com], Microsoft has Passport, and other companies really enjoy the "stickiness" that such capabilities bring.

We have clicks! We have eyeballs! But profits?

[Animats]

Flickr is so 1999. We have clicks! We have eyeballs! We have users! We have traffic!

What's wrong with this picture? Where's the revenue? It's a free hosting service, and they boast about how many people take up their offer of free image hosting.

Does Flickr actually make money for Yahoo?

Subscriptions

[lbft]

Flickr also sells "pro account" subscriptions for the ability to upload more, no ads, etc. for $24.95 a year: http://flickr.com/upgrade/ [flickr.com]

Re:Subscriptions

[henele]

But the point is how many of those accounts were ones given away free (I was given two pro accounts to pass onto friends). The the majority of users not on pro accounts (thats a flat out guess, could be wrong), and then the majority of those pro accounts possibly being received and extended for free, whats the churn rate going to be when the year subs start ending?

I'm a huge, huge fan of flickr, but when discussing recently with a friend she proposed it was a move back to the 'takeover' (Yahoo in this case)

Re:Subscriptions

[uf22]

Flickr is profitable [flickr.com] on its own. Caterina confirmed so in this help forum. They have many pro subscribers and they show a couple of small ads on some pages when you haven't paid for a pro account. It seems that is enough. (disclaimer, I work for Y!)

Re:Subscriptions

[henele]

Interesting, thanks for the link.. Hope you get modded back up to where you should be...

Darn.

[Grendel Drago]

I went out and bought a pro account [flickr.com], and now you're telling me I could have gotten one for free? Darn.

Re:Subscriptions

[eraser.cpp]

I don't upload much, but I bought a pro account just to support flickr. It's amazing.

Re:We have clicks! We have eyeballs! But profits?

[anat0010]

This is the only website I have ever paid a subscription for. Within one week of discovering it, I had reached for my credit card.
As they expand their pay-for services, such as printing and DVD back-up I've no doubt I will be happily paying for those too.

Re:We have clicks! We have eyeballs! But profits?

[tdeuces]

Flickr may not actually be making money for Yahoo! (other than the Pro subscriptions). But getting more people to visit their portal for their news, search, sports scores, stock quotes, etc. does make them money from the advertisements in those areas. Getting people hooked on the Yahoo! "brand" is what is important for them.

Google is doing the exact same thing - they probably don't make a lot of money on Google Earth or Google Desktop Search but it gets people thinking that their company is the one place to

Simple answer ...

[SickLittleMonkey]

Available for a short time only!
http://www.hetemeel.com/einstein/86180.jpg [hetemeel.com]

Image scraping

[Danga]

flickr is awesome if you need a lot of images. Its very easy to write a script to scrape all of the images for a certain keyword. It is also really nice to use if you just want to manually search for some images with some keywords. Kudos to the people who brough Flickr to the web.

Don't forget licensing.

[Grendel Drago]

It also provides the ability to find scads of free-as-in-speech content [flickr.com], some of which is even pretty good.

Re:Don't forget licensing.

[Danga]

yes, that is very true too. I only used the images for testing purposes and did not distribute any of them so was not too worried about copyright issues, but you are right that many images can be found that are "free as in beer". If you have a need to use images Flickr is a great resouce for them.

This Web 2.0 hype...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is just getting sickr and sickr. ;)

What happened to the engineer

[rasgoo]

So, uh, whatever happened to original engineer who thought up the idea? Did he/she ever get anything out of Flickr?

Re:What happened to the engineer

[Usquebaugh]

This was my first thought.

Probably not. He was most likely a paid employee with all rights transferred. My guess he probably got sweet FA above his cheque.

Remmeber children it's not that you have the idea or do the work it's the ability to prove ownership :-)

Re:What happened to the engineer

[Midnight Thunder]

Its not clear who that programmer was. The only programmer mentioned is "Stewart Butterfield", but it is unclear whether he was the original one.

Re:What happened to the engineer

[byolinux]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Henderson [wikipedia.org] is the guy who was the original programmer, I believe.

In his own words: "Cal Henderson has been a web applications developer for far too long and should really start looking for a serious job. Originally from London, England, he currently works at Ludicorp R&D, makers of Flickr, in Vancouver, Canada and Sunnyvale, California. He's been working on Flickr from the day it started development (on his laptop) to the present day (where it's now the "Offical website o

Re:What happened to the engineer

[PeterAllen]

"the original engineer" was the Ludicorp team [http://ludicorp.com./ [ludicorp.com.] Which was purchased by Y!

Totally Love Flickr

[ShaolinTiger]

I have used most of the photoservices and Flickr is by far the best, the folksonomy system is just great.

The interface is nice and simple, the Organize tool is cool, sets are easy to create, and you can easily follow what your contacts are uploading.

Plus set your account to follow other groups/tags/people.

It's really neat, plus it's a great way to archive the photos you display on your site/blog/whatever.

A lot of people do upgrade to the pro account, as the free account only gives you 2 sets, and it's worth

this sound like corporate self-promotion

[ephedream]

You know, more and more I am reading news articles on slashdot that seem to be PR press releases more than they are "news". I mean, this is an interesting article and all, but it seems like shameless corporate patting yourself on the back.

Not Slashdot's fault

[typical]

Slashdot indexes interesting articles and lets us discuss them.

The problem is that some stupidly large chunk of articles in news sources *are* lightly-modified press releases. Because, well, that's just how news works these days.

All you're seeing is a reflection of what the news sources are doing.

Granted, Slashdot can focus more on blogs and so forth than news sources (honestly, the most interesting and in-depth articles do seem to usually come from sources other than conventional news articles). However,

Re:this sound like corporate self-promotion

[Evro]

Well if you think about how many press releases probably get submitted to Slashdot on a given day it's almost inevitable that a few will be accepted. There are any number of ad agencies flooding the queue with press releases because this site is among the most popular with IT/Engineering types. To say nothing of the smaller sites who write up a half-assed review of some crap gadget and flood the queue with it just to get the spike in page views that they can then show their advertisers.

Re:this sound like corporate self-promotion

[kwoff]

Doesn't "has turned into one of the Web's fastest-growing properties" just give you a fuzzy feeling? Properties.

The Important Question

[Medgur]

So what happened to the engineer who created it in the first place?

Re:The Important Question

[jbrw]

I believe the engineer in question is Cal Henderson [iamcal.com]. Last I heard, he'd just built this [iamcaltrain.com] to help him get from his new SF home to his desk at Yahoo! HQ.

He spends a fair chunk of time talking about how flickr was built [flickrnation.com], the notes of which are really interesting for anyone concerned about scaling out a web app.

Re:The Important Question

[Otter]

Last I heard, he'd just built this [iamcaltrain.com] to help him get from his new SF home to his desk at Yahoo! HQ.

I have to admit -- I followed that link expecting to see that he'd built a train between his house and Yahoo, not an AJAX app...

Re:The Important Question

[gfreeman]

He also built http://www.b3ta.com [b3ta.com]

The name is kind of weird to me...

[Mr. Funky]

The name is kind of weird to me because where I live (the Netherlands) 'Flickr' is a harsh synonym for 'Gay' and also is a synonym for 'Bad person'
Apart from the name it is a clever service, especially the tag-thing, like http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sluts/ [flickr.com]

Re:The name is kind of weird to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only Exxon in the US. In the rest of the world it's still Esso [wikipedia.org].

Re:The name is kind of weird to me...

[DataCannibal]

The British English word for a cigarette you are thinking of is fag, not faggot.

In British English a faggot is either a kind of meatball or a bundle of sticks.

There's also another meaning of fag: a younger boy who acts a servant for an older boy at some English public (Amer. Private) schools.

It could be that it's just at Eton or it could be some others but what do I know, I'm only a Grammar School oik.

Best way to share images

[rahulkool]

i was on y! photos before using the flickr but now totally swear by flickr .... coz of the features it provide like easy sharing/easy upload/comments/groups/shows the no of view for each image/communities ...... :)

Flickr alternatives ?

[phoxix]

So anyone know of a nice photo album software with tagging features and such ?

I love flickr, but I love my pictures more and would rather feel safer hosting them on my own ...

(I checked about a month ago on sourceforge, freshmeat, and hotscripts ... found nothing at the time)

Thanks!

Re:Flickr alternatives ?

[commanderfoxtrot]

I've used Zoph for ages. It's really good and I've submitted a script to allow it to host videos sensibly.

I haven't used Gallery 2. I would look into flickr more but it won't host videos and I need them to be kept together.

Coppermine

[KenSeymour]

I am using Coppermine and I am pretty happy with it.

It is free and written in PHP. It runs well on my hosting services web site.

Flickr Question

[CGP314]

I was hoping that some slashbot would be able to help me with this question, since no one on flickr seems to be able to.

Is there anyway to sort through flickr by both creative commons license AND by interestingness?

I ask because I spend a huge amount of time on flickr looking for images that I use in my classroom presentations [colingregorypalmer.net] (also CC licensed) and it seems like madness that I have to look at ALL the 'physics' photos to try and find the few good ones.

-CGP314 on Flickr [flickr.com]