Ten years of being on Flickr

I have to admit I’ve a soft spot for Flickr as I’ve been an avid user for a long time, in fact I signed up 10 years ago this month when it was only eight months old. Although my usage is not what it once was, I’ve made a lot of good friends through the Flickr community and it’s helped my photographic career. A nice little titbit that you might not know: Flickr was spun out of the online Game Neverending’s photo sharing feature. At the time consumer digital photography was really in its infancy and photo editing was not as easy as it now (Lightroom was still three years away). This meant the majority of content on Flickr was unedited digital images which could look a little flat colour wise, this meant that my highly saturated film photos really jumped out from their digital counterparts.

London Millennium Bridge one of early images I uploaded to Flickr

London Millennium Bridge one of early images I uploaded to Flickr

I started to get photography work from my presence on Flickr; in January 2005 Imogen Heap (who I has not heard of at the time) contacted me to shot artwork for her new album. She had seen an image I had shot of the Millennium Bridge and wanted me to retake it but with her in it. When we were together I took a headless portrait of her riding her bicycle which, while I really do like the image, I have to admit it’s a complete fluke as I was cycling along side her and I originally intended to get her head in shot.

Imogen Heap Cycling though London - 2005

Very Serendipitous photo of Imogen Heap that ended up on Flickr’s sign in page.

The fact that her red coat is framed by the light stone wall is completely serendipitous. It gained a lot of attention when I first uploaded it and soon caught the eye of Flickr’s creative designer at the time, George Oats. She asked me if they could use it on the Flickr home page in rotation with other user’s images.

Flickr home page 2005

Flickr home page 2005

Once I had my image on the home page my following on Flickr  sky-rocketed and I was getting job offers and licensing requests regularly. By 2008 I had written my first internationally published photographic how-to book Hot Shots. This came about because Lindy Dunlop who I swam with at the time was checking out my work on Flickr regularly. Unbeknown to me she was a sub-editor at a publisher, and she thought my photography would work well as a how-to book. Lindy and I ended up working on three books together.

Lindy sub editor of all my books is the one in read (clearly likes to break form convention).

Lindy sub editor of all my books is the one in read (clearly likes to break form convention).

Something I hear a lot is “Flickr is dead” and “no one uses it anymore”, I think those statements tend to over simplify the matter; sure I don’t have the same level of interaction as I once did but times have changed. What has to be remembered is that when Flickr started, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram did not even exist, and Facebook was only open to people in higher education institutions. It was only in September 2006 that Facebook allowed the general public to sign up, so for over two years Flickr was a lot of peoples’ first taste of social networking. People have far more choice with what they do online than they did ten years ago. My personal circumstances have also changed, being a father means I can’t spend the (sometimes) hours a day on the site as I once did. Now I will probably post once or twice and week and spend a few minutes looking through other people’s photos.

Even if I have not posted anything new to Flickr my account still gets between 20,000 and 30,000 page views a day, and that tells me that people are still using Flickr and that there is definitely still an audience there.

Flickr and the way people use it has fundamentally changed over the years, that is undeniable. Flickr groups are no longer popular, the type of interaction that happened in groups is far more likely happen on Facebook. The conversations that take place around photos used to really be engaging, now people tend to favourite an image and then move on. People are still having conversations around images, it’s just that these conversations have moved elsewhere.

I used to just post my images to Flickr, now I post to Instagram and Flickr, then I might also repost to Tumblr and, if it’s really good, to Facebook and Google+. If I am honest taking part in social media now feels like a chore, this is probably because I have a lot less leisure time.

I think Instagram is a great platform, it’s obviously gained critical mass when it comes to user numbers. Only yesterday Instagram announced they have more active users than Twitter, They are still about a billion shy of Facebook’s active user count though. Instagram took off because it came about when the majority of people in the western world were getting smart phones. Its down side is that photos have to be square (you can add black or white bars at the top and bottom but that really bugs me). That said Flickr does have an awesome mobile app that is well worth a download. I still think that Flickr photos have more longevity because of the ways you can search for them.

Stormy Seas and Starling Murmuration

Some of my popular images still get hits and favs months after posting to Flickr. The same can not be said for Instagram images.

One of my more popular images of 2014 was this photo of a murmuration of starlings in front on Brighton’s West Pier. On Flickr it had about 66k views in the first week and it still gets views and favourites now. By contrast the same image on Instagram got a lot of love but after 24 hours activity ceased; it’s almost as if Instagram images have an expiry date. This makes Flickr an ideal place to archive images as it has more tools for adding meta data to images and making images searchable, whereas Instagram is more about posting in the moment.

I don’t often go looking that much anymore but occasionally I will stumble across Flickr users that I have never heard of before and am blown away by the quality of their work. This happened recently with 333Bracket who documents her life in exquisite detail and Westographer who documents the quirkiness of the suburbs of Melbourne and Victoria. They post photos regularly. There are also quite a few older accounts that still post amazing work that should be checked out: Alex Bamford for his moonlit work, Finn Hopson for his Sussex Landscapes, Ryan Schude for his incredible cinematic style, Sandro Bisaro for his cityscapes and Hodachrome for is film double exposures.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that Flickr is not dead and it’s worth trying out or coming back to. Remember being a good photographer is more about the pictures you don’t show than the pictures you do. Be selective about what you post and be patient about building up a following. You can find me on Flickr as Lomokev and lot of other social networks: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+.

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13 Responses to Ten years of being on Flickr

  1. iamamro says:

    10 years! Congratulations! I just realised I’m 10 years too. True old timers compared with the other young’uns!

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/fitzrovia/

  2. Lou Vest says:

    Pretty much true. I still get all of my requests for photos and other photo contacts from Flickr. I dabble in Instagram but haven’t had as much interest as Flickr. There’s not much interaction there either. One thing I’ve liked about Flickr is finding friends there. I’ve occasionally made a date with a contact for lunch when I’m traveling and it has always been a positive experience. I came to Flickr in ’06 or so. I still remember the image of the girl in the red coat on the bicycle.

  3. zorkiphoto says:

    Congrats Kev – your stuff was some of the earliest I found when I got on Flickr in 2005. It spurred me to work harder on my Lomo shots. Your Imogen Heap pic was rightly praised – it’s a Flickr classic. Here’s to another 10 years. S

    • lomokev says:

      Flickr Classic there is an expression I have not heard in a while. I remember that images that people would have conversations around, it seems now people look at images once and move on. Shame.

  4. Let’s hope Yahoo gets their act together and keeps investing into Flickr and drives it into the right direction. I’ve been with Flickr for a little more than seven years now and I still maintain my Pro account. I do not care much for extending Flickr into a social network that can compete against Facebook, Tumblr (also Yahoo owned) or Instagram. I’d rather wish Yahoo would introduce more features geared towards photographers – like 500px.com is working on.

    Anyway, congrats for 10 years of amazing work. I think your photos are inspirational and they always give me a boost when I need one.

    • lomokev says:

      I don’t think there looking to make more of a social network (I don’t actually know that for sure). They are still developing new features, recently camera roll which quite neat for going thought your archive I think you can only access your own camera roll. Got to be said minus points for the skeuomorphic name “camera roll”.

  5. Daniel Petry says:

    Great post. I’ve also been around Flickr since 04, migrated from “fotolog”, but then I deleted my account and got back in 07.
    Nowadays Flickr is all about faves, not really about developing a community, friends or photography.
    I have to disagree with you in the whole “Flickr does have an awesome mobile app that is well worth a download.”. Flickr’s app was very good in version 2.0, but right now is just a huge slow pain. Flickr 2012’s changed created a lot of problems that did not exist before. As far as I can see Flickr has been ignoring it’s users requests or taking way to long to listen to them, and that’s really sad.
    The only reason I don’t leave Flickr is because of my contacts. Service wise Flickr’s not a very good photo storing and sharing service anymore. A LOT of people complain about ads and the lack of a paid version, for example. No one wants ads and third party photos showing in their professional photostream, that’s just a huge bummer for professionals that used to use Flickr for displaying their portfolio.
    Most of all, have you seen the “explore” lately? It’s a huge joke.. People with hundreds of thousands of likes in mediocre photos, just because they follow tens of thousands contacts….
    Anyway, Flickr might not be dead, but maybe, for old school users, it would be better if it had already died.

    • lomokev says:

      fotolog that’s a new one to me. I was on something before Flickr which is still going so I won’t mention it’s name as I found there community up it’s own arse. So are you saying you deleted you Flickr account or fotolog account in 2007? I think Flickr do listen to criticism sometimes as they back tracked on photo pages when they put comments and other info to the right of the image. Just had a look at the mobile app and think it’s really slick, also apple recently gave them an award for the iPad app so it can’t be all bad. Professional galleries would be good but there are plenty of alternatives for that. The trouble with something like Flickr is that there are lots of different people trying to use it in lots of different ways can’t please all the all the time. Just had a look at explore and it was not to bad, some people are obsessed with it. Really annoys me when people comment on a photo like: “congratulations on Explore” like the only way the experience Flickr is though explore, so dumb. It’s not dead but it’s certainly not the spritely teenager 😉

  6. Wow, ten years, congratulations Kev. Eight and a half for me. Where does the time go, eh?

  7. It was by using Instagram that I actually got interested in film photography. In the beginning it would only give me very small sized pictures and I wanted to be able to make Instagram-like higher resolution pictures. After that I bought a film camera again, bought your book, etc. Even if I had been a Flickr user since 2006. So Instagram has some merit, even if photos there are indeed pretty ephemeral.

    • lomokev says:

      Always nice to hear about people tempted to use film for their use of new tech. Thanks for getting my book bye the way!

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