Confessions of a Flickr Abuser . . ..

[filmtwit]

I've been member of Flickr since 2007. I originally got a membership to host photos I regularly shot at vintage scooter rallies and over the years I've posted not quite 14,000 photos that I've taken or of 4 generations of my family (going back to my Great Grand Parents). That's 15 years and nearly 14,000 photos. Oh and II should add, that I am a Flickr abuser.

Like a lot of folks, I post a lot of photos and share them to whole lot of groups. Occasionally I get something wrong (such as a vespa motor scooter photo in Lambretta motor scooter group or a digital photo in film group). Most of the time I catch myself making these types of mistakes and am pretty good at fixing them before a moderator complains, though I do get the occasional photo rejected for not quite being the right (what ever that is). I't super rare for me complain, let alone argue about it. I have in 15 years only been banned from one Flickr group - a B&W Landscape group and it was over a single photo (there's a story here, but it really isn't very interesting). I suspect most of have been or done the above. So the above shouldn't be shocker what so ever for any of us and isn't in my mind real flickr abuse.

Anyway, how I have abused flickr is an amusing story of sorts, and after 15 years I finally got caught for it. So here's my little story and confession of sorts: First, I'm an archivist by trade, so I literally tag/catalog photos for a living. I'm pretty decent at it too. Anyway, about 15 years ago I posted some silly photos of my then cat and heavily tag'd the photos with nearly every variation of "cat" that i know, including the word "P cat" (yes, I'm shortening the word here, but I think you what the "P" stands for here). Anyway, I was kind of surprised to see that the photo in question got a what for me, was a very large increase or uptake in view numbers. It took me a moment to figure out why: While flickr used to regularly post it's top 10 words for tagging, apparently they had been lying a bit, because I had never had the type of viewer count uptick that I had gotten after tagging my cat photo with that particular word.

So again, I'm an archivist by trade and didn't take me much to figure out that real flickr top ten list of words had zero to with what they published every week and that like a lot of internet websights, sex sells so to say. Now probably only a few of you know me in real life, and for those of you who do, I have a moderately twisted sense of humor too, so I started tagging all my photos with various body parts because it made laugh out loud that folks would have to see my cat, vintage scooter, landscape photos when they were looking for literally "spank material". I did this for close to 15 years. I did this, it amused me every single day and it went on for nearly 15 years, but apparently someone finally complained and I got a email from flickr about it recently.

So I readily admitted to it with them and why and got to have one last laugh about it. I've removed all the "Tag Spam" too per their request as I'm not really a "bad human" and fine with their call too.

None the less, I am Flickr abuser, what about you? How do you like to abuse your flickr account? Has it been fun? Inquiring minds want to know (and I promise not to turn yeah in).

JTA

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Just a user. Explored and such. But I’m amusing at it several times per week. Sometimes for hour+.
To see those I’m following photos and how cameras rendering in real life, not just in tests.

I knew Helen‘s work from Flickr before RFF.

I have my page in split. Public is mostly with film, bw. Private is digital. Sharing both on forums.

Lately I noticed a lot less activity on following page. I quit from film and have.nothing to show on Public view. Most of those I follow were film as well.

Don’t know what to do. I‘m taking pictures every day. All digital. If I turn them for public view it will make my public view very different…

 

[lxmike]

I used flickr a lot and then I had log in issues and have not been to log in for a few years now and the support from flicker customer support has been totally lacking and un helpful, sadly as I quite liked it

 

[helen.HH]

So 'filmtwit' the 'P' word brought you trouble, oh dear, really how absurd... moreso that it was photos of an endearing pet, a pussycat, in oh so many sexy poses, giggles
Not cloaked tagged nudity ,soft / hard porn shots that exist on flickr
Crazy, stupid on their part
well to a good chuckle !

growing weary of the woke, political 'correctness' World....

As for Moi, I'm a flickr fan... probably reaped the most in numbers there than here on rff

I certainly prefer it over the Insta scene... too small a photo format for viewing, meh to instagram

 

[helen.HH]

I have my page in split. Public is mostly with film, bw. Private is digital. Sharing both on forums.

Lately I noticed a lot less activity on following page. I quit from film and have.nothing to show on Public view. Most of those I follow were film as well.

Dont know what to do. I‘m taking pictures every day. All digital. If I turn them for public view it will make my public view very different…

@Ko.fe, Kostya
hah, so it was there first, 'Flickr' we became friends ...too cool
how lovely a thought to add to my good flickr memories

Why don't you keep your flickr account going with the Digital on your film stream. Bottom line be it film or digi, it's all about the Photos and if they pull You in !
I would certainly continue to follow and comment 🙂

 

[Richard G]

Removed the tags from 15 years of photos? How long did that take? Hopefully you found an automation for that. Some of my best photos have had 13 likes. Other good ones are only in the 4-500s because the subjects were destroyed in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. But I am not tagging much at all. The nice thing about some likes is that you get to discover the person who liked it, and quite often you like their stuff. I am just not a very effective social media user. I've really only put in here. I do like Instagram, love scrolling through masses of photos. Some great things there too. But have to resist the influence, which I do pretty effectively.

I hope you find another amusement. We have a wicked comedian in Australia who did performance mischief as a boy.

 

[filmtwit]

Removed the tags from 15 years of photos? How long did that take? Hopefully you found an automation for that. Some of my best photos have had 13 likes. Other good ones are only in the 4-500s because the subjects were destroyed in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. But I am not tagging much at all. The nice thing about some likes is that you get to discover the person who liked it, and quite often you like their stuff. I am just not a very effective social media user. I've really only put in here. I do like Instagram, love scrolling through masses of photos. Some great things there too. But have to resist the influence, which I do pretty effectively.

I hope you find another amusement. We have a wicked comedian in Australia who did performance mischief as a boy.

It actually took about 5 minutes. Yes, the main tool for removing tags is horrible (organize/edit photo/tags) and if I had to use that, I simply would have deactivated my account due to the numbers here, during my time I awaited reply to my initial email on the subject I found an old thread that indicated a much easier to use and did the work lickity split.

This is how you use it. First, go to your flickr tag list, for me this is https://www.flickr.com/photos/filmtwit/tags
Now add to the end of that link /(word you want removed)/delete and it will batch remove that word from all your photos.

AS I used about a dozen "words" that could be seen as "Tag Spam" I removed them all.

I have asked if using the P-word on cat specific photos will get me into any further trouble (since the word/tag is correctly being used in this case).
No word back on that one!

AS far a likes, I think I get between 10-20 on most of my photos that I post to flickr as a whole (usually after I drop them in groups). I'm a competent amateur photographer, I show more photos then I should too, so you can see many of mistakes or more repetitive work within my account too. Due to the misuse of tags though I get 3-5 times the "Views" due to those tags though. So my counts used to be rather large. Now a days (since my photos are not publically searchable due to my misuse of tags) I get about 2,000-3,500 views on my photos most days.

 

[bluesun267]

I haven't abused Flickr, but have been abused by Flickr, and recently deleted my account after 10 years (thread here).

Initially I was a bit sad about it but after a couple months I have to say I don't miss it in the least. In fact it's been one of the best decisions I've made in a long time. It provided some impetus for me to move forward with my photography.

 

[farlymac]

I always wondered why one of my photos of a Ricoh Mate got so many looks. I finally put it down to the second half of the name as the main reason. But once I looked up the Stats on it, I realized I had split the name into two tags, so Mate was probably what folks were looking for. Sorry to have disappointed so many people, as it only has 2 Faves. It finally dropped off my Top Ten Views list months ago, but is still hanging in there at number 16.

PF

 

[filmtwit]

Helen - over the course of the last 10 years or so of doing this, I've added about dozen more special sexy body part words, so I'm not sure if that's the specific word that got me into trouble here.

Congrats on the work and friends you've made from it too. One my first friend of sorts via flickr was "The Underlord" an English scooterist who like me is a good amateur photographer and was also photo documenting his scooter rally material back in the day (he has a cooler day job though). He's the first to have noticed my interesting tagging and we openingly talked about it under a few my photos close to 10 years ago. He even bought my old Voitlander r2 from me maybe 7 years ago too. Nice guy to say the least.

 

[DownUnder]

Abuser, amuser. Two words with very different meanings. Not really interchangeable. One denotes addiction, bullying. The other pleasure.

One can be both, I suppose. In photo-terms, to me the first denotes someone who turns up at every family event with a DSLR (we all know this type) and then proceeds to make everyone's life a misery by poking said camera down every nose, or posts 1,792 images of the school fest or last weekend's club picnic and then feels cheated if all the attendees don't log in and scroll thru the entire lot. We've all known this type of abuser.

The amusers are fewer and further between, but they are there, and some are truly a joy. Flickr has its fair share. As does rangefinderforum.

I was a very early Flickr member - way, way back when (hint: pre 2006) - and now I admit I got into it purely for commercial means, as an architect with my own small city practice I thought it would be a way for me to promote myself through my images, maybe even sell some.

My biggest mistake, I think was I didn't plan my marketing properly and set up everything as public. I had many visits but few sales. Some publishers did buy, but one told me they found so much similar work (which I doubt as mine was and still is, "one of a kind" with very little competition) elsewhere on Flickr, and they found they had "too much choice". Blah to that, I thought. But I didn't get many sales.

First, one viewer complained about one of my images, taken in a public place. They claimed they were "absolutely sure" one of the (20 or so) people in a photo was them, but they hadn't signed a release for me to post. Flickr blocked my account. It took me a while to sort this out. In the end the offending image was removed and I was reinstated. The complainer then contacted me and wanted a copy (free of course) of the photo!! They are (maybe) still waiting for it...

Then it all quickly became undone when someone went into my folders and copied dozens of images which they then reposted as their own. A publisher client in Europe somehow came across those copies and complained to me as they had bought one time publication rights from me to several. Flickr were not at all interested in doing anything to help, so I pulled the plug on them and took all my images out.

I still have an account but never post anything. In fact I can't recall the last time I went into it. Probably in 2020. As aforesaid, my intentions were purely business anyway as I have no family left in Canada (I live in Australia) and my partner posts our home photos via emails directly to kin in Malaysia.

Okay, it serves its purpose (as several posters in this thread have attested) and if it works for them, well and good. I am in fact, even (slightly) envious. For me, it meant only problems, and that's why I got out.

In 2007 or 2008 I set up a small, password protected web site for myself. At most it had about 30 clients and got me about as many sales (more images than that, just the number of sales) every year. I shut it down in 2020 after Covid more or less destroyed most of the photo sale market for my type of photography, but my old clients are now telling me they are back in the market for my type of work, and I'm now quietly rebuilding/reloading the site with a view to returning it to the web next month.

In the end for me Flickr was all too much work for nothing. My own private web site gives me a lot of pleasure to set up. It's also a lot of work, but at least it's all mine.

Admittedly my situation is quite different from most others, as I don't post for private reasons or for public viewing. But it also means I avoid all the hassles of complainers and their complaints - also I don't have to deal with the crackpots, cranks, malcontents and outright loonies, of which there are great numbers online.