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.
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
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.
So, uh, whatever happened to original engineer who thought up the idea? Did he/she ever get anything out of Flickr?
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
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 believe the engineer in question is Cal Henderson. Last I heard, he'd just built this 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, the notes of which are really interesting for anyone concerned about scaling out a web app.
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) !
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