How Many Photos Are Uploaded To Flickr Each Day

In 2007, Flickr was the most pop dedicated photo-sharing site on the web, and growing exponentially in terms of new images uploaded. There was no Instagram or Unsplash around, and essentially that'due south what Flickr could have go. A decade afterward, in 2018, Flickr was sold to the relatively unknown visitor SmugMug.

What could Yahoo!, the site'due south former owner, take done so poorly in the years in between? How could Instagram accept taken the lead and then quickly after its launch in 2010? Is Flickr headed toward a virtual grave, or is it still a compelling service for some people?

A Promising Start

In 2004, the virtually popular sites on the spider web were Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and other sites that offered news stories and indexes of recommended websites. User participation was unremarkably limited to comments on news stories and online forums. Flickr was considered a pioneer of the Spider web 2.0 era, alongside the likes of MySpace, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube, whose content was generated generally by their users.

Flickr was launched in 2004, only like Facebook, by Ludicorp, founded past the married couple, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. The image hosting service became an instant hit for its constructive utilise of features that are considered obvious today, such as tags, favorites, comments, groups, sets (i.e. albums), the ability to list another user as a friend (or "family unit" for selective sharing), and the ability to embed photos in a "blog."

Flickr had 2 account types: gratis accounts, limited to 20MB of uploads per month, and Pro accounts, with upward to 2GB of monthly uploads for $25 per twelvemonth.

Yahoo! purchased Ludicorp in 2005, for a sum estimated to exist effectually $25 one thousand thousand. Compared to the $one billion that Facebook paid for Instagram in 2012 (to the anaesthesia of many), it now looks ridiculous.

At get-go, it looked similar Yahoo!'due south resources would aid Flickr become one of the largest sites on the web: in 2006, the upload limit was raised to 100MB per calendar month for free accounts, and lifted birthday for Pro accounts. In 2007, Flickr was ranked equally the 19th-largest site on the web past Alexa.

Years of Neglect

In January 2007, Yahoo! appear that all Flickr users would accept to associate their accounts with Yahoo! accounts, which required them to provide more personal information to continue using Flickr. While annoying the community isn't a recommended tactic, Flickr's real problem started later that same year.

In June 2007, the iPhone was released, and companies such as Facebook quickly started working on mobile apps for their sites, which would go available to the public in 2008.

Whether it was the outcome or the crusade of Yahoo!'southward indifference, Simulated and Butterfield left the visitor in 2008. Yahoo! only launched an official Flickr app in late 2009, giving Facebook and potentially many others plenty of time to become the go-to choice for sharing photos among mobile users.

When the app finally launched, it lacked almost of the features that made desktop users cull Flickr over Facebook in the beginning place: it could only bear witness images in resolutions up to 600 pixels broad, it didn't include the "interesting" section, it couldn't edit images, and it removed the EXIF information from photos when uploading.

As well relying on Yahoo!'s website for logging in, the app couldn't create a new account, send push notifications, upload several images at once, download images to the iPhone, delete images, or edit their properties.

Devastating penalization for Yahoo!'south neglect came in 2010 with the launch of Instagram. At beginning, Instagram didn't even accept hashtags or a desktop version. Except for filters, all information technology did was brand the sharing of images from iPhones easy. With Instagram around, the improvements to Flickr's app over time didn't look exciting.

The fact that Flickr's app had an Android version before Instagram didn't matter much either. By 2012, Instagram had added an Android version, Facebook'southward financial bankroll, and l one thousand thousand monthly active users.

A Late Improvement

In tardily 2012, Yahoo! finally launched Flickr 2.0 - the iPhone app that Flickr users had wanted for years. The "interesting/nearby" section displayed images next, keeping their distinct aspect ratios, similarly to the "justified view" that Flickr's site had offered for almost a year.

The "contacts" department let you scroll horizontally for more than images from the aforementioned author, or vertically for images from other contacts. When you lot pinched to zoom in on an prototype, the app would load a higher-resolution version of it. The app's born photographic camera had editing options, including filters.

The new app arrived alongside an Android version, and a new plan of 1TB of storage for both Pro and costless users in 2013. While the price of an advert-costless Pro account was doubled to $50 per yr, the improvements helped brand Flickr more popular than ever earlier. It only had one trouble: everyone's friends were already on Instagram.

In 2014, Flickr launched an official iPad app. In 2015, once Google Photos became independent of the infamous Google+ social network, Flickr quickly fell out of favor, despite a quick response with its Uploadr app.

Noah's Ark of Photos

In 2017, Verizon purchased Yahoo!, and reorganized it under the proper name Oath (now Verizon Media). Less than a year later, Flickr was sold to SmugMug. The new possessor, with its more limited resources, announced that free accounts would get limited to 1,000 images, regardless of file size, and ended the policy of keeping the Pro account fee at $25 per year for legacy Pro users.

In 2019, SmugMug started deleting Flickr images of free users, except for the newest 1,000 and Creative Commons images.

User Frank Michel estimated that the site had lost 63% of its images as a outcome. In 2020, SmugMug increased the fee for a Pro account to $threescore per twelvemonth, saying that the site was still losing money.

Despite all of those concerning changes, Flickr isn't quite as unpopular every bit you lot may think: information technology'due south constantly ranked past Alexa amidst the summit 500 sites globally, and among the top 300 in the U.S.

It would appear that an one-time community of professional photographers is keeping the site live. Unless SmugMug tin can sell Flickr to a bigger company or come up with a new and revolutionary feature, however, the site'south remaining years may be few...

The Aftermath

Today, the most popular image sharing service is Google Photos, known for its ability to recognize people and places in photos and create albums of photos containing them. For years, it provided unlimited complimentary storage of images up to 16MP, and videos upwards to 1080p. This, combined with Google's resources and integration with Android phones, drove user adoption to the masses, even so as of 2021 information technology at present only provides 15 GB of storage for free.

Instagram remains the near pop social network based around images. Professional photographers tend to adopt Unsplash, now owned past Getty Images. DeviantArt is basically Unsplash for graphical artists.

Those who want to embed images on sites that don't store them (like Reddit was until 2016) use services like Imgur, which doesn't even require a user account. The leading source for GIF-way images is Giphy, purchased past Facebook for $400 one thousand thousand in 2020.

TechSpot's "What Ever Happened to..." Series

The story of software apps and companies that at ane point hit mainstream and were widely used, but are now gone. We cover the most prominent areas of their history, innovations, successes and controversies.