Flickr

[bhop73]

I think you people calling it a "dumping ground" or "not a photography site" or whatever, are basing your opinions solely on the explore section, or maybe just don't know how to use it properly.

There are still thousands of 'serious' photographers on there, with good work. It's like any community, it'll have a mix of good and bad. Once you find some of the good ones, it's easy to find more by following their contacts or favorites, or by searching for groups that you're interested in.

Don't complain about flickr if you are not willing to use searching filters and tags.
You know it's a massive database of photos.
You know that good photos are not found in the majority.

And good luck finding a better alternative; I've tried, and unless I want to make that my day job, I gave up.

Btw, I agree, Explore is a waste of time. But *a lot* of people like to waste time. If you don't, ignore it.

That pretty much sums it up IMO.

 

[Out to Lunch]

If any platform has boosted the global sharing of pictures which would otherwise lie in the sock drawer, it's Flickr. If you think it's all bad -which it isn't, do you own thing. Cheers, Peter

 

[drew.saunders]

If you think flickr tastes are odd, tumblr links to flickr photos is even stranger. A while back, someone posted a link to one of my flickr photos (http://www.flickr.com/photos/drew_saunders/5972419952/) on his tumblr page. It's a ship model in a church on the Big Island of Hawai'i. I think either his late father was very fond of ship models, and this photo made him think of his father, or his late father was very fond of this particular model in this church. Anyway, the number of re-links and hits that this photo has gotten astonishes me, and those are just the ones I see of people properly linking instead of just stealing the image. It's just a ship model! I think I did a reasonable job of the framing with the 24mm lens and didn't completely bugger the exposure, but still, it's not all that special!

It's true, if you want lots of looks, then pretty girls, puppies, kittens and food seem to be popular. If you got a pretty girl feeding French macarons to her puppy or kitten, you'd have a million hits per hour.

 

[j.scooter]

I found the decline in quality on Flickr coincided with the 500px gain in popularity.

 

[Ming The Merciless]

Could someone explain the meaning of HDR. It's been used in this discussion but I don't know what it means. Thanks.

 

[Bill58]

When I was uploading the other day using the flickr uploader, it gave me double image uploads. How weird! I'm not the most PC proficient guy around, so did I do something wrong?

Anybody else had that problem?

 

[peterm1]

I find that with Flickr the secret lies in the Groups you subscribe to.

There is a lot of junk in Flickr. It is easy to join and the first 200 uploads are free - so that virtually guarantees that everyone with an Iphone who has taken a photo of their pet cat or baby will use it. But if you selectively search for interesting high quality Groups you will find a much higher proportion of good quality images.

One particular thing I like about Flickr is that its easy to post your photos on Groups and that beings traffic to your Flickr page. Similarly you can link to specific people when you find a photographer you like. Flickr allows you to name them as a contact / friend and find their images again in future. This is also a great way of avoiding rubbish on Flicker as its easy to browse images and I usually do this through Groups / Contacts I am interested in.

( Searching is a bit of a different issue - perhaps partly because of the huge quantity of images on the site. But I think it goes further than that - I always use meta data on my images but even then Flickr's search function seems to have trouble finding my images / metadata even if I know that the meta data I have used it pretty unique. Thats one downside of Flickr - which is more of a technical limitation. )

I also like the way people who view my images can post comments or link to my images by naming them as favourites. This keeps people coming to my pages and giving me feedback which helps my photography and my motivation.

Flickr also gives stats. The stats tell me I have had 40,000 hits on my images over the past 3 years or so. Not bad but chicken feed compared to some peoples' hit rate. I find that is both gratifying and useful to know.

So all in all I do not knock Flickr. I find its not a bad site for my purposes and in particular it brings quite a lot of traffic to my photos simply because there are a lot of people who are interested in photography who are members. Of course the price you pay is that not all of these are Robert Capas or Henri Cartier Bressons and hence I cannot guarantee that I will be interested or impressed with all of their photos.

In other words, yes there is a lot of crap.

(THINKS----------Wonder if cavemen in the ice age were saying this about cave paintings? "Hey I just had a look at Oggs cave - has the walls all painted and its utter garbage. All those spray silhouettes of hands. No imagination. No paintings of buffalo or sabre tooth tigers. And you should just see the over saturated HDR stuff he puts out - all the same and probably made with that cheap consumer ochre that you find down by the river." 🙂

 

[Araakii]

Crap is a relative term. Every 6 months I find a lot of the stuff I uploaded 6 months ago were crap (which of course I didn't realize at the time). So while we look at some of other people's stuff and think they are crap, someone else better than us is saying the same thing about our images.

 

[maddoc]

Except for the quite restricted layout possibilities of flickr (I also use pbase with more possibilities in changing the layout) it seems to me the best compromise of photo-sharing site and photo-related discussion in the groups. The groups on flickr are really helpful and I have often found very informative tips in of their discussion boards.

On the other hand, I hardly ever look at the Explore of flickr because I am not interested into the majority of photos that make it into Explore.

 

[RBruceCR]

I enjoyo Flickr very much! Finding people with common interests, with better pictures than mine, being able to comment and being able to read comments from others all across the world is priceless. Only second to meeting the people in real life!

 

[mathomas]

Could someone explain the meaning of HDR. It's been used in this discussion but I don't know what it means. Thanks.

HDR = High Dynamic Range

It's a digital method of taking exposure-bracketed shots and combining them into one image with software. It's best used with very high-contrast situations to preserve highlights and shadows, where we all know digital cameras fall apart (for now, anyway) due to limited dynamic range. It's a very effective technique when used tastefully. Problem is, people don't seem to be able to use it tastefully. 90% of HDR imagery on flickr is way over the top.

 

[mathomas]

I personally love flickr. It's many different things to many different people. And to some degree it's what you make it.

It's not just a great place for me to share photos -- I've also learned a LOT there. Because of the tagging/searching technology, I look at flickr as a huge database of photos that I can search for anything that might interest me. How does the 50mm Summarit f/1.5 look on Tri-X? Search flickr. How do other people's Ektar scans come out compared to mine? Search flickr. How does Efke 50 look in Rodinal 1+50? You get the picture...

I'm one of those with thousands of photos on flickr (over 2,500 at this point, with nearly a million views). I take a lot of photos, and I share and tag them, to some degree, in order to contribute to the great database of photos that is flickr. (Note that I didn't say "database of great photos").

Flickr's community features are great too. I think they do a great job of tracking user comments on photos, and the groups have been very useful to me (the only problem with groups is they don't notify you when a topic you've started is updated).

I don't pay much attention to Explore. Nor do I do anything to try to get there. Every once in a while I'll look to see what I've posted that may have made it to Explore. A few of my uploads have made it. Most have been my paintings and drawings. A few have been photos that I've liked pretty well, and a few more are total mysteries -- a boring picture of an iPod and a boring picture of a watercolor palette (which has over 7,300 views -- apparently a lot of people want to see what a secondary color palette looks like), etc.

Just for fun, here's a "poster" of my explored stuff, to annoy the haters 🙂



Latest Explore "Poster" by mike thomas, on Flickr

 

[biomed]

Don't forget the over abundance of crappy HDR shots

AMEN!!! HDR is a great tool used in moderation. There are a few subjects that can stand max HDR settings, but holy F**K, not every shot that is posted. I guess that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It reminds me of a photo book a friend of mine had published. Many beautiful mountain scenic shots. About 80% had waterfalls or streams photographed at a slow shutter speed to give the soft blurred water effect. It looked very nice for the first few photos then became very tiresome and somewhat boring.

There are quite a few RFF members that have posted excellent work on Flickr. I have had an account with Flickr for a few years and will probably continue to do so.



Mike

 

[Vincent.G]

I follow a select group of people whose work I draw inspiration from. Most are from RFF. I add them as my contacts. I don't bother about Explore at all.

PS: Can someone please look at my Flickr and tell me whether I am guilty of contributing garbage or not?

 

[Araakii]

It's funny that I just got on Explore tonight as we are talking about this.


Urusei Yatsura #1 by Araakii, on Flickr

 

[btgc]

Funny thing is I learned about Flickr from Ken Rockwell as a site which doesn't lock on certain genre or style. And he is true. So when he get blamed I do not care to join. Photo sites in the academic vein aren't my cup of tea.

 

[mathomas]

It's funny that I just got on Explore tonight as we are talking about this.


Urusei Yatsura #1 by Araakii, on Flickr

Dude, pretty much every one of your portraits is explore-worthy!

 

[jarski]

guess every free or almost free photo hosting eventually turns to growing pile of mundane photos. agree with maddoc about groups being good way to reduce the noise.

 

[PatrickCheung]

I have one photo that's been explored... it was a joke photo my friend asked me to take... none of my serious work has ever been explored though... don't know if that means that I produce bad photos when I'm trying, if I produce better photos when I don't care, or if the hoi poloi has bad taste...

1243 views. I remember seeing about 900 within the first two-three days of uploading... I also remember being a little ashamed that THIS was the photo that made explore.

 

[btgc]

I also remember being a little ashamed that THIS was the photo that made explore.

Also remember photographers usually are bad editors. I'm not saying this is genious work but sometimes photographers are too attached to their work and can not really judge own work.