Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I've never used Flickr, but I have been using Gallery 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 share my photos with my friends and family has just been a real joy for me. And no, it's not pr0n.
I suppose I could use the Flickr API, but I just wanted something I could stick on my own private site. If something bad happened with Flickr it would be far too much of a hassle to have to deal with someone else's system.
She lives on 123 Fake Street.
There is always ruby. I know you can create a flickr prog rather fast...
/me waits to be flamed
Quality for Software
You can reach her with comments at foo@bar.com
Yea, because there aren't any voyeurs on the internet.
Coranon Silaria, Ozoo Mahoke
Try using the left mouse button.
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 tags, or joined to public photo groups. You can then search by tag, or browse groups. e.g.
Every Flickr photo tagged with "londoneye":
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/londoneye/
Group for photos of the City of London:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/cityoflondon/
Flickr is pretty good!
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
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.
Jonathanjk.com
That's a pretty bad analogy ;)
I use the Tab and Enter keys you insensitive clod!
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You mean "trap". Durr. She's trapping you into stupidity.
No.
Try using the left mouse button.
Which one?
Why would someone work in only black and white? Is this the 20th century equivalent of shitty Photoshop filters?
I just want to let you know how impressed I am by the photo of you and your team. 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 after-work cock-sucking-in-a-circle party". I look forward to conducting business with you soon, primarily based upon that photo of you and your team, as there was little other information available on your website, but I know how business is thesedays and who really has the time to update their website anyway? Regards, regards, and all and sundry.
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 for some examples
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
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?
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.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Flickr also sells "pro account" subscriptions for the ability to upload more, no ads, etc. for $24.95 a year: http://flickr.com/upgrade/
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.
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.
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.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
...is just getting sickr and sickr. ;)
So, uh, whatever happened to original engineer who thought up the idea? Did he/she ever get anything out of Flickr?
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.
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 the upgrade if you do use flickr a lot.
Share your Knowlege - Kung-Fu Geekery
I went out and bought a pro account, and now you're telling me I could have gotten one for free? Darn.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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.
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.
I want my game, not some dumb photo album. Next thing they'll be telling us they scrapped making Halo IV in order to make socks!!
It also provides the ability to find scads of free-as-in-speech content, some of which is even pretty good.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
So what happened to the engineer who created it in the first place?
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!
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/
Damnit Jim, I'm [root@localhost w00t]#, not an AD-Adminstrator(tm) !
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 ...... :)
i work for money, if u want loyalty, Go get a Dog.
So anyone know of a nice photo album software with tagging features and such ?
...
... found nothing at the time)
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
Thanks!
Mac user?
HAHA! Wow. WHY would anyone take that even for a STOCK photo shoot?! Unless someone is creating media for "GayExecutiveCircleJerkBukkake.com," that picture is completely uncalled for.
"Pic1: Moments before show time!"
I mean LOOK at it. How can that be interpreted as anything else but none-too-subtle sexualized dominance. It's a ring of sycophants ready to "service" their master. "All johnsons on CEO Johnson!" I mean, seriously, WTF? This bothers me. Not the message, but the fact that someone would be so dense as to put it on an actual business site and not think that people's eyebrows are going to jump. Unless, like I said, your business charges $19.95 a month with "discrete" recurrent billing.
OK. Too much anger for a Sunday morning. Getting coffee.
If Yahoo leaves Flickr just the way it is, it's gonna be killer. But leave it to American MBAs to fuck up the simplest things.
Actually, what's wrong with Flickr is they let people take other peoples' copyrighted pictures, post them as their own. and then don't do anything when you prove you're the owner.
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 to choke on progressive saved JPEGs. You can't even delete them properly once you uploaded them... strange.
I do have a Flickr account and a Gallery2 setup. I used Gallery2 to upload visual experiments (like: look here for the crop you suggested) while discussing my photos within the Flickr service.
Or you can do tags within your own photos, so to see my photos of the Toronto International Auto Show recently, you could go to:
w
http://flickr.com/photos/mikebabcock/tags/autosho
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.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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, Microsoft has Passport, and other companies really enjoy the "stickiness" that such capabilities bring.
For more information, click here.
Those of us with long memories may remember when happened to Geocities after Yahoo bought it out.
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. Flickr feels social to me. And I think my pictures get looked at more. It's well worth the $25 for pro.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
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, it would probably be pretty easy to just write a script that scans each Slashdot article summary for links, and checks to see if those links are to some list of conventional news sources that you dislike and just filter out those articles.
I've been pretty happy with the BBC and other British news sources. C|Net seems to usually be pretty good. I like Economist articles -- they're long enough to have excellent, informative articles. NASA and the ACM seem to be pretty good. The New Scientist seems to get a lot of IMHO bizarre articles referenced on Slashdot -- I dunno about them. If the NYT didn't have that godawful registration, they'd range from not-so-good to pretty-darn-good. On the other hand, CNN tends to do puff pieces -- an attention-grabbing headline, lots of emotional appeal, and then not much in-depth content (and while I dislike Bush, their mudslinging over even trivial things reaches the ridiculous). Fox News...well, I don't think we even need to go there.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
What I really like is
1. The use of frames. It's not at all like frames have been found wanting since the mid '90s.
2. The use of tables for layout. Brilliant. Hardly anyone does that. It's really making use of existing technology there!
3. And to top it off, the image is scaled up just enough (from 180x176 to 250x239) to change the aspect ratio (from 1.023 to 1.046) and make it blurry. How appropriate when talking about a service that handles resizing.
Actually, that's what Yahoo! did when they bought Geocities.
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.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
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 (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
Oh please - as if the "welcome to my homepage" fad didn't implode on it's own as people got over it and the dot-com "intarweb is awesome" bubble passed. If Geocities had a time and place - it was in the 90's.
Besides, it's still going if you really want to create your own little website on free hosting. (Although blogs are in fashion now, not homepages).
http://caterina.net/
This is just another instance of a Canadian selling off bit of Canada to the yanks. It makes me SICK.
Or to... uh... y'know... shoot black and white.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
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 minutes. He has skill, they don't.
I happen to agree. Photoshopped pictures does not equal art. Not saying photoshop isn't a valuable tool, I find it handy for what I do with it, collages and colorizations/photocorrection. But in art and professional photography it is best used sparingly.
And the parent is correct, even with photoshop, and filters, photoshop doesn't handle duotone as well as a decent B&W film. Mostly because you frame, and handle your stops/focus different. Photoshop is only as good as the original photo.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
And any other piece of webspace is any different?
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
there is a certian 'je ne sais quoi' that B/W has.
:-)
Snobbery?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Available for a short time only!
http://www.hetemeel.com/einstein/86180.jpg
main() {1;}
Personal plug: I've been developing my own alternative photo bloggy thing 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
myselfmusic