Dave Stevenson
Understanding exactly why Flickr is brilliant – and why it’s appealed to a huge number of photographers – isn’t difficult. Starting a photo blog will cost you money for webspace, and, unless you’ve got a gift for self-promotion that would make Piers Morgan look shy, no-one will ever visit, much less get in touch.
Flickr’s groups feature is genius as well, allowing like-minded photographers to share the photos of the things they love with each other, in the process leaving tips on how to photograph things better and where to do so. It’s also a great place to host photos, supplying you with keyword and geo-tagging, plus allowing you to see the Exif data left on photos. Flickr is also unarguably one of the best places online for finding out about new lenses before you commit to buying them. Want to see if Sigma’s 120-300mm f/2.8 is any good? Pop the relevant search terms into Flickr’s search box and see the results users have got from actually using it.
With a Pro account, you also get unlimited storage space for as many photos as you can take, and it supports HD video. What’s not to love?
For one thing, I dislike how Flickr appears to have become a stomping ground for tight-fisted picture editors. Over the years, I’ve been regularly approached by picture editors who came across one of my shots and wanted to know if they could use it in some guide book or other. Naturally, because my work was on Flickr the assumption was that I couldn’t possibly have expected to get paid for it. Indeed, in a former role as a section editor on a magazine in Australia, I once contacted someone whose work was on Flickr to see if I could use it to illustrate a page. I only reflected afterwards that if the photographer’s work was good enough to print, it was probably good enough to pay for. I’m not saying that Flickr cheapens work, but the kind of people who visit Flickr to find photographs to use professionally are unlikely to be the kind who are willing to open their chequebooks.
There’s also the problem that no technical measures are taken to prevent unscrupulous types from simply dragging images from Flickr onto their desktops and using them. That means you either need to watermark and compress your images to the point that they’re unusable, or you need to make your entire collection private, which defeats the object. The option to include a link on each of your images to allow viewers to license your photos through Getty is useful, but I’m not sure it’ll end the problem.
A perfect example of this cropped up last month, when the excellent BBC magazine website ran a story on black squirrels. On the page, Auntie ran a few images of squirrels, and rather oddly credited both the photographer and Flickr, as if it was an agency. My Spidey-senses tingling, I contacted the photographer to see if the BBC was pinching images from Flickr, perhaps under the misapprehension that every image on the site was free. In the end, it turned out that the BBC was contacting each photographer before using their images, although I never got to the bottom of whether the Beeb was paying for them. Given that my repeated requests to the press office were ignored, I strongly suspect not.
There are other problems with Flickr to boot. I dislike, for instance, that ridiculous populist fads such as HDR have caught on in such a massive way. HDR has its place, but when a website offers you 2.2 million HDR images, things have gone too far. Flickr also needs to police its comment system much more carefully. I accept that, initially, it’s a pleasant ego boost to discover that a picture has been invited to a group. The thrill lessens somewhat when it becomes clear that your image was invited on the strength of its keywords and that the group you’ve been invited to join has a hundred thousand members. Comments are a kind of currency on Flickr, with users effectively trading comments on photos, and in the process contributing absolutely nothing to creative photography and generating a huge amount of meaningless noise.
So what now? If you use Flickr and like it, then you should absolutely not stop using it on my account. Certainly, there’s plenty to be said for engaging with a community. And, while it’s easy to be snobby about using Flickr to host or back up your photos, the site makes it incredibly easy to embed your images in third-party websites, and unlimited storage for around £16 a year isn’t exactly a bad deal compared with most web-host or online backup companies.
Personally, though, I’m tired of receiving frequent emails from people inviting me to join groups I’m not interested in (the Canon DSLR User Group? No thanks), or, worse, emails from people asking if they can have my work for free. And while Flickr might be a decent look for online backup, uploading all of my work to Flickr would take the better part of a year assuming my Internet connection did nothing else, and it would be a nightmare to download if something did go wrong.
Perhaps, though, my willingness to let Flickr go says more about me than it does about the hugely popular and, admittedly, great-value service. I don’t particularly want to get involved with navel gazing about my or anyone else’s images: I’d much rather be outside taking more.
