@adders Community is what Flickr lost years ago. I’m glad to see they recognize a need to restore that aspect.
@ronguest The thing Iiked best about Flickr was the integration of the Creative Commons. When they got bought the new owners seemed to completely fail to understand the nature of the resource they owned—if you didn't pay them, they'd start deleting your OLD photos (i.e. the ones that had been their long enough for people to find and use them). As soon as they made it clear that they thought your NEWEST photos were the ones they expected you to care about, I set up a photo-sharing instance on my own site: images.philipbrewer.net
@philipbrewer @ronguest "the new owners completely fail to understand the nature of the resource they owned".
That seems a little overstated. I believe they understand it, but initially focused on what they felt was the largest failure of the prior owners (e.g. unlimited free sharing for everyone) and probably underestimated scope and undercommunicated their plans. They understand that they don't want to offer unlimited hosting w/ads and so made a decision that pissed off a lot of users. Tough call, and they've stumbled, but I remain optimistic and trust them to do the right thing most of the time.
It's good that they are working with CC teams to ensure the commons is maintained (see creativecommons.org/2018/11/0... and blog.flickr.net/2018/11/0...).
How would you choose which photos to automatically keep for millions of free users? I'd personally like to select the specific 1000 images I want to keep. :) That might work, but they still need a default behavior and keeping the newest photos seems sensible to me, for most people.
Your albums look great! Lychee looks like a nice option. I have galleries that could use something like that, so thanks!
@jack I was a Flickr member starting in 2004. In those early days, the limit was on upload bandwidth: You could upload (I think it was) 100 MB of images per month, but once they were there, they were free to store. That meant you had to select your images (rather than just uploading your filmroll).
I made all but my family photos CC-BY, and several of them were widely used. The most widely used was from 2007, so would have been one of the ones deleted. That would have been sad for me, and sad for all the people who used it on web pages and print publications, and especially the people who might use it going forward (because it would have been gone), and I'd argue sad for Flickr as well—there are thousands of links from all over the web that link back to my creative commons photos there.
Those photos are all still there because I had less than 1000 public photos, and before the deadline I deleted all my unposted filmroll photos. But I was close enough to the limit that I could see that, if I kept posting photos, it was only a matter of time before my old ones—the most valuable ones—started going away.
Besides limiting bandwidth (more expensive than storage space anyway), the other option that might have convinced me to stay would have been to say that images shared with a creative commons license didn't count against the 1000 photo limit. They said stuff that implied that they were thinking along those lines, but I didn't see a clear statement that made me comfortable enough to stay with them.
I am very pleased with Lychee! Open source and actively being maintained and improved. I'd like slightly better creative commons support there two—it should add machine-readable metadata to the pages to mark them as licensed, and it should report them as licensed to the various search engines that allow you to search specifically for licensed content. (And since it is open source, I should do that myself. I just haven't yet, due to my slothful nature.)
@philipbrewer Thanks for the clarification. It's never ideal to have content just disappear, and I hope the Flickr folks work toward preventing it where possible.
I'm testing both Lychee (thanks to you) and Chevereto as a gallery hosting option. Ironically, I'm more likely to use one of them to replace my SmugMug account than I am to replace Flickr :)
@jack I was under the impression that Flickr made the decision to keep all public CC licensed material in the end?
They have made mistakes, sure, but they really seem to be listening.
@adders I'm not sure where they landed with that, but I seem to recall them planning/trying to keep all of it.
@jack @adders @philipbrewer From this post:
... today we’re ... now protecting all public, freely licensed images on Flickr, regardless of the date they were uploaded.
@simonwoods Right. But what does that mean for me if I have, let's say, 900 licensed photos and 100 photos of family members (that I don't license) and then I upload one more photo? Can I upload another 900 family photos before I hit the limit? Or do they delete my oldest family photo to keep me under 1000 total? Their posts didn't make it clear, which is why I just decided to host my own photos.
@philipbrewer I'm surprised you weren't already self-hosting. It sounds like you ought to have been doing this for years by this point.
@simonwoods Just since 2018, primarily because I REALLY liked Flickr from 2004 up until then: It did exactly what I wanted, and did it very well. I still morn that various failures that kept Flickr from being the first hugely successful social media site.
@philipbrewer Lychee is pleasant to use, looks good, and doesn't try to do too much. We have a winner! I'm running it at galleries.baty.net . Thanks for turning me on to it!
@jack Cool! Glad to hear it! (I went to look at your gallery, but because the subdomain name doesn't match the certificate name my web browsers won't show it to me. It used to be easy enough to override that in cases like this where there's no real security implications, but browsers seem have gotten more stubborn—I couldn't mange to quicky get through.)
@philipbrewer Eeek! So much for my "nary a hitch" description of the server migration. Something's amiss with my AWS setup. Thanks for letting me know!
@philipbrewer Thanks again for the heads up. I think I've fixed it things with galleries.baty.net. (it was DNS. may require a reload). I've begun using photos hosted there as embeds for other sites, so looks like I'll be sticking with Lychee for a while!