This is such a disaster for the online photographic community.
Flickr had a monopoly on almost all serious photographers who were active on the internet. If you wanted to research about a kind of film, or a lens type, or a camera type, you could just search around on flickr and find photographic examples of what you were looking for.
If you wanted a place to store and use as a host, you could just upload your photos to flickr and people would randomly find and sometimes order your photographs.
Now all of that is gone.
This is the biggest blow to photography in the last several years IMO. Yahoo has killed flickr and they won't change it back.
It's all gone?? Really?
🙄
I didn't realize that groups, discussions, tags, RSS & Atom feeds, Web & Data APIs, contacts, explore and search had all been removed! It's weird, but when I go to Flickr, they all seem to still be there for me. I've never tried selling photos via Flickr, so maybe that part has disappeared overnight...
The push towards the stronger advertisement based model I'm not so keen on, at all; the gratuitous price increase to remove ads is pretty insulting and seems like a plain money grab. I'd love to have overheard the meetings discussing the pricing model changes and reasoning.
The CEO's pithy remarks definitely haven't helped her win support from either the wanna-be pro or professional community, but many of them already left a long time ago for the 'greener pastures' of SmugMug, 500px, Google+ and other services. I don't hold what she said against Flickr's programming team, and I'm quite happy to see them finally make much needed changes, after years of stasis.
I wish there was more control over the layout of my photo stream's first page, but I think the visual changes just take some time to get used to. In the long run, it probably is a superior solution than what was there before. For instance, I already find the new view to be MUCH more engaging when looking at other photographers that I am interested in, it is so much easier to get a feel for their work and to appreciate it. The old Flickr tiny preview images and paging was one of the things I always hated the most about Flickr...
Overall, the view of individual images is ten times better than before, I much more prefer the dark background and the even larger display of the photo, while comments, groups and distracting text has been pushed below the fold - making for a significantly cleaner layout. They've also massively expanded support for full screen, and slideshows. (Though I'm not big on the Ken Burns style one.)
I hated how small Flickr used to display photographs, and they've been busily addressing that over the past year. It is one of the reasons why I signed up for 500px, but the community there I've never really gotten used to, I still much prefer Flickr's groups and communal feel. I've long been mystified by the love pros have showered on Google+ as a Flickr alternative, considering the draconian censorship there and the lack of discovery...