I think the time has come, after eleven years to leave Flickr.
Back in the middle of the 2000s we saw an explosion of social media sites, we saw the birth of YouTube in 2005, Twitter hopped onto the web in 2006. Flickr was launched as a social photography site in 2004.
I joined Flickr in April 2007, a month after I had joined the Twitter. I think the reason I joined was that many of my professional peers were either members, or were joining at the same time.
The first photograph I uploaded was of Admiralty Arch having just emerged from the Strand Tube station. The photo was taken on March 30th 2007 with a Nokia N73 mobile phone.
I went Pro in July 2007 and have then since paid every year for the professional account. I have at the time of writing 14,280 photographs on Flickr.
I like to think that this is my top photograph, it’s of a zebra at the West Midland Safari Park.
The reality is that it’s a classroom in Gloucestershire College.
I use Flickr partly as a place to store photographs, but mainly to collate photographs into “albums” so I can find them easily when I need images for presentations, to share images on Flickr, or to use images on my blogs.
An example workflow, is to take a photograph of some nice food, edit and post to Instagram, then use IFTTT to upload that resulting image not just to Twitter, but also to Flickr. I can then download the image from Flickr and upload to the blog. I use to occasionally embed straight from Flickr, then that stopped working for a while, so I stopped using it.
However I think the time has come to cull my Flickr account. I don’t think it’s worth $50 per year. The value is there, but I am not sure if that value is $50. I am a little disappointed that existing Pro subscribers are not only not grandfathered in, on their old pro rate, but that they don’t even get the introductory discount of 40% that new subscribers get.
I still have a little time to reflect on this, but I think the time has come to say goodbye to Flickr.