Another oversight is privacy. It requires consent of the model, called a Model Release, at least in Europe. Which is not to dismiss Unsplash as a whole. It is the go-to platform for free high quality images, and their UX is great. For photographers, it can be a great exposure tool.
My final thought regarding Unsplash concerns their business model. My understanding is that they used to fund Unsplash for it bringing valuable referrals to their parent company, Crew.
Which no longer exists. The latest news on their business model is almost 2 years old. The simple question as to who pays what and whom is left unanswered.
The partner is equally vague. He promised to do follow-up posts about the specifics. Two years ago. There are no follow-up posts. Perhaps we truly are moments away from a revolution in photography. Not at scale. Post revolution, I want you to come here and comment on how wrong I was. Because I like to be wrong about this one.
In any case, a lot is at stake in the world of free photos. In particular the cover photo of many PowerPoint decks. In general though, I would like to generalize that the grass does not seem that much greener on the other side. In particular, every photo sharing community faces the same challenges:. Or maybe not. For amateurs and enthusiasts, my personal advise is as follows. Forget about all of the above and first and foremost return to enjoy your hobby.
Enjoy photography itself as well as your topics, be they a landscape, a model or a freaky insect. Or even a Snowy Owl. This is your hobby and you should learn to enjoy it even if not a single other human being notices. Start with this. Your joy and self worth should not depend on others. Look at people having other hobbies. Reading, hiking, tennis, wood crafts, brewing beer, collecting stamps, watching movies or playing Tetris…none of these people spend hours per day seeking validation as to whether their hobby is worthwhile or has meaning.
It has meaning because it is your time and you enjoy doing it. None of them determine meaning based on others as if they are monitoring a stock market of self worth. If it requires constant validation for you to enjoy photography or your topics, you do not enjoy photography in itself. Wrong hobby. I enjoy photography for the sake of photography. I enjoy my topics even more. I like it when people appreciate the result of my hobby. I prefer likes over 0 likes.
But I do not require it. You should probably take an hour or so to appreciate the above work. It beats anything you were going to watch on Netflix. There are very few zoologists who also are pro-level photographers. This man is best-in-class. The very best in his field. Instead, he is nowhere to be found. Should you want to appreciate this man though, buy his prints. And it comes with priceless smug potential.
When friends come over, they will be like: WOW! What the hell is that!? It will also sustain him for one month. Yes, really. It would sustain them for 3 seconds. You pick whom to support. When you support free , you support billionaires.
When you pay, you support sane businesses and real creators. Start paying for things that cost money. Anyway, you may still want to share your work and find some community. Not to validate yourself, instead to enjoy your hobby even more by connecting with peers.
Find a place that is small yet deep, and intimate. Find peers that really do care about your work. Focus on meaning and deep engagement, not quantity and shallow engagement. I have a cousin.
He devotes his life to fishing. He cannot get me to care about fishing. I cannot get him to care about photography. Go to a place where people do care. Go to your true peers.
Go there. This section is probably needless because I believe SmugMug is competent and level-headed. However, this is my blog and I can write whatever I want. Example: China is the best country. No censorship. Here goes…. It has been interpreted as if the very end of Flickr as a whole is near, possibly triggering an exodus in itself. I believe this to be false, and not the intention of the message. Flickr will not be shutdown.
Not ever. Additional measures may be needed, some painful, but it will not be shutdown. Fake news. Clear up this confusion. Commit and say it aloud. You cannot compete against social networks and mobile apps like Instagram.
Focus on a photographers audience, not a mainstream audience. No mainstream audience will regularly check Flickr, that boat has sailed. Focus on what nobody thinks is cool: desktops. Leverage these users. Make it the best desktop experience of any photography website.
Make it high quality, smooth and advanced. Forget mobile minimalism, it sucks on desktops. Let them call you a Boomer and wear it with pride. You can compete with Big Tech. Big Tech is about quantity, noise, speed, cheap and meaningless. Human tech is about quality, depth, meaning and deep community.
Clean up bots and spam. But also, clean up inactive areas and low value content. Put it on low cost storage, keep it yet hide it from view, or in the worst case…delete. But probably archive.
Not only a cost saving, also a signal that the community is still there. So restaurant owners seat their family and friends and strategically place them near the window as if regular customers. The opposite can also happen. A restaurant full of corpses. Stiff atmosphere. So, hide the corpses. Put them in the freezer or something. Be careful about which freezer, given the still living dining guests.
After the cleanup, things may have scaled down, yet not really. It will not look small, it will still look huge. Make the place appear alive by hiding things that are not. As demonstrated earlier, Flickr is full of gems of artistic, cultural and educational value. This is arguably a difficult problem to solve, but worthwhile to improve upon. Showcasing hidden value may require a combination of algorithm, curation and moderation.
Likewise, the uneven distribution problem Snowy Owl is worthwhile to address. A backup plan in case my table startup fails. Every photo community seems to have a specific distribution of user types:.
The percentages may vary per community, but this section is about the Loyalists. Loyalists are a small hardcore group that make an unnaturally large contribution to the place.
They may be Pro users or very active enthusiasts. Loyalists may visit and contribute every day, some even for hours on end. Communities live by this group. Very brutally put, they can almost be considered unpaid labor. They are living evidence of the most powerful alliance known to mankind: the perfect alignment of personal and shared interests. Which achieves miracles. Loyalists have made your place their home. They moved in.
They have invested time, money, both and therefore have a vested interest in the continued existence and health of the place. Together, they pretty much run the place. Loyalists are a power to leverage. They contribute with money, time, and do dirty work for free that is hard to scale yourself: removing spam, guiding new users, building connections, enforcing rules, curating content and even recruiting new members.
Therefore treat them like they are your employees. Listen to them, praise them and take them serious. They are the key to a healthy community. When they ask for 5 features, give them 1, and explain why the other 4 cannot be done. They will understand and even appreciate such honest dialogue. Share your road map with them.
Treat them as insiders. Some companies treat their loyalists like shit. An example of that is StackOverflow. There was a revolt, and as a result, some left. But most did not. In the radio silence that followed, those that stayed were practically begging for some more spit, it would be better than this radio silence.
The psychology of this is absolutely fascinating. They are essentially doing free work for a company that actively mistreats them. Why would you possibly continue to do that? Why not just stop, and leave?
Because of several reasons:. This just shows how powerful loyalty can be. Treat them like gold, and magic will happen. This is an idea to combat the steep difference between a free account and a paid account. Perhaps more tiers can be added in between. To show you how effective this can be: I care very little about the contents of my smartphone.
So as I was hitting my GB limit, approaching the paid tier, my initial plan was to just clean up stuff, or to move it elsewhere. My willingness to pay spiked because this way I could avoid doing work. And paying was so easy, so I did. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all.
Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Flickr has been sold after 13 years at Yahoo. Can Flickr be relevant again?
Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Fans of Flickr seem cautiously optimistic about the move. Especially on the backend. Others praised SmugMug as a worthwhile service on its own. If nothing else, SmugMug now finds itself in possession of a cherished relic from the early days of Web 2. SmugMug announced the end of the free terabyte in November , encouraging users to upgrade or back up their files.
When we talk about the loss of internet culture, a lot of roads lead back to Yahoo. Or more generally, to acquisitions and consolidations in the tech sphere that come with streamlining — not just the winnowing down of valuations and the loss of jobs, but the ditching of troves of images, videos, and text that go unclaimed when email address-based user accounts change hands and get lost.
A much smaller site than Flickr, Webshots held about million photos at the time Flickr had more than 6 billion at the same point. There is not a single person who knows anything who would say differently. Scott says he personally suggested that the company allow people to gift each other Pro accounts, and they set it up as an option six days later. The Internet Archive is duplicating as much as it can, based on requests.
Things will get lost, including a big chunk of internet history. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all.
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