Flickr is shutting down Marketplace, its commercial photo licensing program

There are a lot of photographers out there how enjoy "the old way": putting time into the creation of the photo right at the time of shooting instead of taking the same - or more - time for post processing. Some of these people have retreated to their own sites, because none of the social networks offer the slow, steady, carefully crafted publishing what they'd prefer.

Indeed Flickr was - still could be - a good place for these people. It's a niche market, true, but if the service is fading, you might want to target a group which is currently not targeted by anyone. ( No, 500px is _not_ an alternative; that is a very long discussion, why, approximately summarized by Sarah Marino[1] )

Instead of targeting high profile amateurs, who are already willing to pay for their hobby, Flickr created a mobile app, which, by default, consumes ALL images and video on the device, acts, works and looks too similar to Instagram.

I know growth is god, but it really shouldn't be, especially not in this case. They should have focused on enthusiasts, though it might be too late now.

( I'm just silently noting that maybe they stop making UI changes to the site and make it work without an excessive amount of crappy JS, and instead try to figure out the target market. )

[1]: http://www.naturephotoguides.com/blog/photo-consumption-conf...

I disagree with this wholeheartedly. Pictures I take with my phone are "in the moment" pictures something like "oh look my son put his pants on his head, that's a keeper". Those I throw on facebook so my mom can check it out... and then i'm done.

But when I pull out my $1500 DSLR, it's not a firehose (well it is, but not what i'm going to publish) I'm going to go through hundreds of pics, pick 20 or so that matter, and then put effort into touching them up... because I shot in RAW just so I could do that.

After you spent literally hours making that photo "just right", that's what I use flikr for. It's also nice to have other photographers find your stuff, and comment on how nice it is.

I think this is just one more point of "if you want to do a startup, look for something owned by Yahoo, and build that"

I find it difficult to relate to you. I have been an active internet user since 1997 and have never used flickr a lot and don't feel I will miss anything if it goes away. Also, if Flickr is such a seminal piece of property, its usage would have been through the roof which is clearly not the case. Yes - it was popular during its heydays but now it is just another photo storing/sharing app.

I think this is a bit of a hyperbole. To me the definitive feature of the internet is the potential it offers in networking services, offering accessibility to great pools of data and serving as a forum to cheaply create networks of value from producers to customers.

In this scope a public repository of photographic data is one embodiment of this potential. Just changing the behaviour of this single embodiment does very little to affect the fabric of the internet.

Maybe there are social bubbles for whom flickr is much more important but if I had to list any number of internet services that I consider markable flickr would have not been on that list.

I was a heavy Flikr user for quite a long time; until the new laws were pushed (in the UK at least) to allow the likes of google to declare 'untraceable' images as fair game for their own business needs.

It's now too easy for corporation to rip off the work of photographers, so I removed the content I had online, and will only post the odd photo to my G+ these days. Not the 'stream' of stuff I used to do with Flikr back then.

Ironically, I think the site that has killed the market for commercial photos is Yahoo's other free photo hosting service: Tumblr. Image copyright is now practically a dead letter if you're an amateur.

I agree. My account has grown to over 10,000 photos and videos of my family, from our early dating, wedding, two kids. It's all pretty easily searchable, well-organized, and simple to back up. We've been using it since Bush was in office.

I don't know of any other tool or service that makes it as easy as Flickr does for my wife and I to collectively maintain a library of family photos. I will happily maintain my Flickr Pro subscription for as long as the service stays in business.

You'll probably want auto-sync from your laptop/phone/etc too.

I think Nextcloud on a VPS or your own server could work? It supports external storage too (S3 etc). Though it's not just for photos.

https://github.com/nextcloud

I'm not sure if they do RAW previews, but should be possible to add.

Koken looks OK too, more photo oriented - http://koken.me/

I haven't run across anything convincingly good. I've put together my own system (that is nowhere near as advanced as what you are suggesting) using a static site generator (jekyll) and a script to sync my image folders to s3 and generate yaml files for the albums. I use lambda/apigateway for the login endpoint and that generates a cloudfront signed cookie for access control to the otherwise static website. It works but I wish I had more time to add features (search, tagging, face detection, etc...). Not really something that i plan on open sourcing though.

yeah, and it is still marked as NEW in their photo search IU :-|

They want about $280USD per picture of 300dpi, which is waaaaaaaaay overpriced. On Shutterstock, you can get 2 images for $29 with the most expensive plan.

No wonder they failed.

HDD space is cheap, combine a big one of those with a service like CrashPlan. Even if you do a self hosted solution you want to make sure things are backed up.

IMHO they don't have a clear enough focus.

In terms of being a cloud service for photo storage, they can't compete with Google Photos, iCloud and other mobile services that have the benefit of being more deeply integrated and available as a default on their respective platforms.

The social network aspect is obliterated by Instagram, Snapchat and the like.

The photo reselling part I'm not familiar with, but it seems to be lacking in a similar fashion.

In short - their high point was the time when they primarily catered to photographers. All three aspects of the service were useful for that crowd and perhaps if they kept that position and developed advanced features that appeal to that particular crowd, they could have remained strong. But once they started reaching out to the general public, they alienated their original audience and at the same time failed to compete with (originally) smaller services that provided a better experience in each specific field.

That's the way I see it.

IMO, it's the price.

They want about $40USD per picture of 72dpi, which is waaaaaaaaay overpriced. On Shutterstock, you can get 2 images for $29 with the most expensive plan (not sure about the resolution, though).

No wonder they failed.

I've been using 500px lately for my publicly available photos. Seems to be the most popular alternative.

For private stuff I am hosting the originals on my own NAS and upload a copy in Google Photos for easy searching.

Instagram. You can use hashtags to organize your photos similar to Lightroom and tag your friends to keep track of who's in them. I also found out if you use the hidden "Full Ten" filter it retains the original quality.

Sounds like my use case for Flickr differs a lot from the ones mentioned here. I don't store everything there (Over a terabyte of raw photos etc is not worth publishing;-), only photos I want to publish as an enthusiast photographer and see other photographers photos + talk about them. For that Flickr still trumps over 500px, Facebook* and any other service I've seen. Would've probably quit photography as a hobby multiple times without Flickr.

* Facebook is where other people are and there are some good groups but for really following other photographers it sucks + FB molesting JPEGs is just horrible.

500px is apparently where all the cool kids go. I use Google Photos.

(500px has a really weird community. The hive mind likes photos edited to have a certain look, and there are lots of random people that show up to like your photos in the hope that you will like theirs, and they'll get popular enough to be featured on the front page. As a result, I don't use it. My friends on G+ are enough sharing for me :)