This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme.
I was there pretty early. I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr that my Pro account upload quota was upgraded to 2GB monthly.
Made many friends via my photos, online and in-real-life. Many of my photos became pretty popular and picked (stolen a lot too) up by major newspapers/publications in India, USA, and even in Vietnam. Some even bought the original copy and rights. It was never my intention to sell my photos nor will that ever be but my guestimate is that I sold quite a lot (high single digit thousands of dollars).
I donated and gifted a lot of Pro accounts to people who asked, mostly students and thos who commented nicely on my blog. Many of my payments comes to Paypal and it got accumulated and there were no ways to get the money to India (for a very long time). So, I just used it to gift to others.
Before I stopped using it more than a decade ago. It had garnered over 10+ million views and my tenure with Flickr lasted almost a decade.
I've been a pro member for many years, with about 35k photos uploaded. I am grateful that they have never chased the engagement bait. Some people like to complain about the Pro features but I found them to be absolutely fair and I wanna do everything I can to support this platform.
All of my photos are automatically synced to Flickr via the Auto uploader, and getting things from my camera to Flickr is as simple as transferring the data from the dslr to my phone, and the auto uploader takes care of the rest.
From there I can go through the photos, decide which ones I wanna make public, and organize them into my albums to share with others.
My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
Lately I've been enjoying photography a lot but Flickr never clicked for me. Instagram nowadays is almost unusable for this as it prioritizes reels too much and 500px... I liked that one more than Flickr.
Right now, I'm using glass.photo and I actually quite like it. You have to pay, though, which is a high entrance barrier, but I feel the quality of what I see in the site is great, the platform works nicely and the community has been welcoming so far.
I yearn for a good site to share and comment photos which is a bit more open, though.
There's also Irys (from Alan Schaller). It's more open than Glass, as it's a freemium model, but it's also more closed at the same time, as it doesn't offer a web-based version. It's probably even more photographer-oriented than Glass. For something truly open, there's Pixelfed. All those platforms have their pros and cons, especially regarding the audience. Personally, I publish all my photos on my own website and syndicate them to (in order of preference): Glass, Pixelfed, Instagram, Irys.
I've tried Irys as well but the mobile only is kind of a deal breaker for me — I like seeing images in the big monitor to appreciate them more.
Of course I also have my webpage to showcase my favourite pictures but I feel I'm more picky in that site than in, say, Glass and instagram, since I want to show 'the best' there :-)
Which is basically a "pro-ish-plus" version of Flickr from the same owners as far as I know. I've been a Pro user of Flickr for a long time but probably hard to justify at this point which probably means that it's even harder to justify for the average consumer. Interviewewed them back in the day when they were a prominent AWS customer.
I was there pretty early. I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr that my Pro account upload quota was upgraded to 2GB monthly.
Made many friends via my photos, online and in-real-life. Many of my photos became pretty popular and picked (stolen a lot too) up by major newspapers/publications in India, USA, and even in Vietnam. Some even bought the original copy and rights. It was never my intention to sell my photos nor will that ever be but my guestimate is that I sold quite a lot (high single digit thousands of dollars).
I donated and gifted a lot of Pro accounts to people who asked, mostly students and thos who commented nicely on my blog. Many of my payments comes to Paypal and it got accumulated and there were no ways to get the money to India (for a very long time). So, I just used it to gift to others.
Before I stopped using it more than a decade ago. It had garnered over 10+ million views and my tenure with Flickr lasted almost a decade.
I’ve taken backups/takeout but do not have the heart to delete my account yet. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/
All of my photos are automatically synced to Flickr via the Auto uploader, and getting things from my camera to Flickr is as simple as transferring the data from the dslr to my phone, and the auto uploader takes care of the rest.
From there I can go through the photos, decide which ones I wanna make public, and organize them into my albums to share with others.
My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
Right now, I'm using glass.photo and I actually quite like it. You have to pay, though, which is a high entrance barrier, but I feel the quality of what I see in the site is great, the platform works nicely and the community has been welcoming so far.
I yearn for a good site to share and comment photos which is a bit more open, though.
Of course I also have my webpage to showcase my favourite pictures but I feel I'm more picky in that site than in, say, Glass and instagram, since I want to show 'the best' there :-)