Flickr

Long-term owners

still has my pics despite threatening to delete them for like 15 years

Aug 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• Glass photo sharingPeople recommend Glass as a photo-sharing service with a well-considered UI/UX and a sustainable, profitable business model, though it requires payment.7recommend
• SmugMugLong-running photo hosting service people trust to keep their photos safe, and a model others copy. Critics point to the free tier's 1000-photo limit and dated design.6recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 95 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Glad they captured what we're doing - photography & community - and what we're not - algorithmic feeds & privacy violations.

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

2. Their API was one of the first and honestly still one of the most enjoyable to actually use as a developer.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

3. Flickr was, and continues to be, a place where people who use actual camera equipment post photos

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

4. keeping the platform alive for paying customers, rather than dumping losses for growth hacks

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

5. Still happily paying for Pro every year and using the API to pull images into my website.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

6. Relative to our peers, it's a bargain for unlimited storage, advertising free, etc etc.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

7. The photos I have from that 2000s era are still around purely thanks to that site.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever”

8. It was the only photo sharing website that emphasized the art of photography

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

9. the API still works, and I basically use it as a DAM for my wife's website

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

10. No matter how many gigabytes you had uploaded, you can still access them.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5!”

11. still has my pics despite threatening to delete them for like 15 years

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?”

12. Flickr was a great way to explore the work of other like-minded folks

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

13. Yeah the time capsule thing is a big part of its value to me.

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

14. my 2772 images can still be seen, even by logged out visitors

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

15. Made many friends via my photos, online and in-real-life.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

16. The elegance of flickr is just nice and browsing is fun.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

17. it and its APIs were a good example of clean URL design

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

18. limiting the number of photos users could upload, instead of limiting the quality, somehow made it more like a social media platform

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

19. They're also holding the photos that are left hostage; unless you pay them, you can't download the photos you have left there.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

20. Flickr's response was deleting my profile, all of my photos, and not responding to any of my attempts to contact them.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

21. The problem with the Flickr algorithm was that it ended up promoting a very predictable style of photos

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

22. I was a happy user for many years and lost access to my photos due to authentication changes.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

23. losing content and accounts with no customer support is the internet way apparently

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

24. In one of their transitions, they seemed to somehow deleted most of my photos.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

25. I would have to pay an indefinite subscription to contribute to the commons.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

26. Don't forget their "interestingness" algorithm that would determine which photos get to the top position in groups and other shares views.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

27. They were kinda the first real Web 2.0 social media site, with a social graph, privacy controls, a developer API, tagging, RSS feeds.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company”

28. I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr that my Pro account upload quota was upgraded to 2GB monthly.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

29. Flickr was the first site I saw where you could edit some text on the screen inline, without a complete page reload

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Celebrating Interesting Flickr Technologies”

30. there's always the slight dread that you kill Flickr because it's a blip of a side hustle to the main business

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

31. Although not a huge financial success it was one of the most popular websites on the internet at that time.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “A game studio turned it's last $6M into Slack”

32. Washington state DOT uses it to post pictures for construction progress updates to this day. It's great!

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

33. it is a treasure trove of photos from the period 2005 - 2015, and incredibly easy to search / filter

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

34. flickr allowed image downloads, there was a dropdown in the UI with the available sizes for years

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

35. It still has plenty of active users (myself included) but it feels much smaller than the 2010s.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

36. interesting technical features that Flickr had also done that I thought were worth celebrating

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Celebrating Interesting Flickr Technologies”

37. that's bog standard normal business, and why I'll never again post my photos to a free site

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

38. Have you explored making downloading individual photos and albums a prominent feature?

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”

39. it's a solid photo sharing service. I can send links and people just get the photos

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme”

40. I find it helpful for me to add note on part on the photo for future reference

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”