{"slug": "flickr", "name": "Flickr", "category": "media", "category_name": "Media and creative", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 12, "warners": 3, "score": 1.512, "rising": -0.98, "first": "2025-11-28", "latest": "2026-04-26", "why": "Washington state DOT uses it to post pictures for construction progress updates to this day. It\u2019s great!", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 6, "compare": 0, "warn": 4}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "Washington state DOT uses it to post pictures for construction progress updates to this day. It\u2019s great!", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "flickr.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.flickr.com", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Flickr"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 766507504, "item_id": 47906719, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906719", "by": "Brajeshwar", "date": "2026-04-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "API was the other best thing about Flickr", "excerpt": "Yes, API was the other best thing about Flickr. A friend made his fortune, especially during the exodus days of Flickr. He traveled around the world photographing some of the best pictures I have seen in my life. I retired pretty early in the Himalayas (he is originally from there). He made Bulkr, which was one of those tools that just works and super easy to use, in getting all of your photos offline from Flickr. I ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766505424, "item_id": 47906589, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906589", "by": "incanus77", "date": "2026-04-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "making great use of their excellent API", "excerpt": "I signed up in 2004. It was part of a wave of hot new platforms, all of which it seems Yahoo! was acquiring (except YouTube, which went to Google). We used it at work as well (political consultancy) to host photos for applications, making great use of their excellent API. The idea of getting your photos back out again via a sane API with multiple sizes including thumbnails handled for you was pretty wild.", "context": "", "use_case": "Photo hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766504048, "item_id": 47906503, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906503", "by": "Brajeshwar", "date": "2026-04-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr", "excerpt": "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. So", "context": "", "use_case": "Photo sharing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 754389872, "item_id": 47149367, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149367", "by": "anon7000", "date": "2026-02-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Washington state DOT uses it to post pictures for construction progress updates to this day. It\u2019s great!", "excerpt": "Interestingly, Washington state DOT uses it to post pictures for construction progress updates to this day. It\u2019s great! https://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 766595664, "item_id": 47912229, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912229", "by": "VimEscapeArtist", "date": "2026-04-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I can't recommend it to anyone.", "excerpt": "I considered Flickr as a place for my photography portfolio, but I can't recommend it to anyone. Try sharing a portfolio link with someone who doesn't have an account there. It'll open with these nasty pop-ups, even if you have the paid version. So I looked for a good alternative and found the paid https://glass.photo/ -- almost no one uses it, the service probably won't survive the next 5-10 years, but at least the ", "context": "", "use_case": "Photography portfolio hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766515808, "item_id": 47907238, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907238", "by": "chromacity", "date": "2026-04-25", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I stopped using Flickr around the time they started flirting with bait-and-switch strategies", "excerpt": "At the peak of its popularity, Flickr was an interesting glimpse of the coming age of algorithmic homogeneity. In the mid-2010s, most of their top photos looked basically the same: heavily shopped, oversaturated HDR landscapes. I stopped using Flickr around the time they started flirting with bait-and-switch strategies - \"we'll hide / delete your old photos unless you pay\" - so maybe things have gotten better... alth", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 742781313, "item_id": 46423832, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46423832", "by": "ajdude", "date": "2025-12-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I wanted to move away from flickr", "excerpt": "Also a plex pass holder. Been using it for years, and finally pulled the trigger to buy Plex pass lifetime because I wanted to move away from flickr and love that I could automatically upload photos taken on my phone to Plex. ... not a week later they've announced that they were getting rid of that feature Then they forced everybody into having us username accounts, change things so I couldn't just visit my media ser", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "Flickr", "story": "Self-hosting is being enshittified"}]}], "who": [{"by": "ajdude", "context": "blogger", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47908928", "date": "2026-04-26"}, {"by": "JohnBooty", "context": "used to run a community", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081519", "date": "2025-11-28"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["photo sharing", "photography portfolio hosting", "sharing photos on blog", "photo hosting"], "compared": [], "makers": [{"id": 766560240, "item_id": 47910015, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47910015", "by": "onethumb", "date": "2026-04-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "", "excerpt": "We have a lot of mobile usage and the app works fine, so I'd love to know more about what you're experiencing with it. Can you contact our Support Heroes so we can assist? https://www.flickrhelp.com/ You make a fair point about the age verification thing. I'll look into it. It's probably based on a legal requirement that we have to deal with, even if the solution is silly. Sorry about that.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766559744, "item_id": 47909984, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909984", "by": "onethumb", "date": "2026-04-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We do have real, human, in-house customer support. It's good and fast.", "excerpt": "We rely on self- and community-moderation. As long as content is flagged appropriately, we allow and embrace content that's often banned on other platforms, such as artistic nudes. Not everything is allowed, though - here's the list: https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/20529310987796-The-rules-of-Flickr We do have real, human, in-house customer support. It's good and fast.", "context": "works at Flickr", "use_case": "photo sharing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867473", "title": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform", "mentions": 10}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47100714", "title": "Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47833092", "title": "NASA Artemis Posters", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47347977", "title": "Celebrating Interesting Flickr Technologies", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47124149", "title": "A simple web we own", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416618", "title": "Self-hosting is being enshittified", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 1}, "2025-12": {"warn": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 2, "warn": 3}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 766595664, "item_id": 47912229, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912229", "by": "VimEscapeArtist", "date": "2026-04-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I can't recommend it to anyone.", "excerpt": "I considered Flickr as a place for my photography portfolio, but I can't recommend it to anyone. Try sharing a portfolio link with someone who doesn't have an account there. It'll open with these nasty pop-ups, even if you have the paid version. So I looked for a good alternative and found the paid https://glass.photo/ -- almost no one uses it, the service probably won't survive the next 5-10 years, but at least the ", "context": "", "use_case": "Photography portfolio hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766570832, "item_id": 47910677, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47910677", "by": "adrithmetiqa", "date": "2026-04-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "", "excerpt": "This article got me curious as I used Flickr years ago. Sadly couldn\u2019t even move past the cookie banner at all. Too bad", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766559376, "item_id": 47909961, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909961", "by": "onethumb", "date": "2026-04-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Thanks for the feedback and feature request. I don't hear this request often for Flickr, but it's a core and beloved feature on our other platform, SmugMug, which you might want to check out if you haven't.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766542848, "item_id": 47908928, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47908928", "by": "ajdude", "date": "2026-04-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "For every photo I like to share which can be a lot when I am blogging...", "excerpt": "I explained it here back when their forum was still open: https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157714720744427/page27/#reply72157722724199360 They have bbcode and html embed, with dynamic width and automatic linking back to the page with alt text, but nothing for markdown. I can use HTML for my blog but my blog is written and marked down and I would rather just stick to markdown, plus many forums have switched t", "context": "blogger", "use_case": "sharing photos on blog", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766515808, "item_id": 47907238, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907238", "by": "chromacity", "date": "2026-04-25", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I stopped using Flickr around the time they started flirting with bait-and-switch strategies", "excerpt": "At the peak of its popularity, Flickr was an interesting glimpse of the coming age of algorithmic homogeneity. In the mid-2010s, most of their top photos looked basically the same: heavily shopped, oversaturated HDR landscapes. I stopped using Flickr around the time they started flirting with bait-and-switch strategies - \"we'll hide / delete your old photos unless you pay\" - so maybe things have gotten better... alth", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766507504, "item_id": 47906719, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906719", "by": "Brajeshwar", "date": "2026-04-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "API was the other best thing about Flickr", "excerpt": "Yes, API was the other best thing about Flickr. A friend made his fortune, especially during the exodus days of Flickr. He traveled around the world photographing some of the best pictures I have seen in my life. I retired pretty early in the Himalayas (he is originally from there). He made Bulkr, which was one of those tools that just works and super easy to use, in getting all of your photos offline from Flickr. I ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766505424, "item_id": 47906589, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906589", "by": "incanus77", "date": "2026-04-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "making great use of their excellent API", "excerpt": "I signed up in 2004. It was part of a wave of hot new platforms, all of which it seems Yahoo! was acquiring (except YouTube, which went to Google). We used it at work as well (political consultancy) to host photos for applications, making great use of their excellent API. The idea of getting your photos back out again via a sane API with multiple sizes including thumbnails handled for you was pretty wild.", "context": "", "use_case": "Photo hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 766504048, "item_id": 47906503, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906503", "by": "Brajeshwar", "date": "2026-04-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I remember being super happy on a day I got an email from Flickr", "excerpt": "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. So", "context": "", "use_case": "Photo sharing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform"}, {"id": 765443104, "item_id": 47840194, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47840194", "by": "tregoning", "date": "2026-04-20", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Just search in flickr for the image id and you will get the relevant image in Flickr.", "excerpt": "Little known fact... this images are actually backed by Flickr.com and in there you get to download the original size vs \"large\" which seems to only be available on the nasa.gov site Just search in flickr for the image id and you will get the relevant image in Flickr. e.g. https://flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/55208327975", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "NASA Artemis Posters"}, {"id": 757809616, "item_id": 47363101, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363101", "by": "tecleandor", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "you could add photos to Flickr with a machine tag", "excerpt": "I remember using machine tags Last.fm back, back in the day (late 00s, maybe even 2010). That was still the time of the mashup/remixed web pages, and APIs were more open and you could do very fun stuff crossing Google Maps, Facebook, Craigslist and whatever. Then, Last.fm was a good site to keep track of the events (concerts/festivals) you were planning to go or you had visited. Every event had an ID (let's say, 3792", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Celebrating Interesting Flickr Technologies"}, {"id": 754389872, "item_id": 47149367, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149367", "by": "anon7000", "date": "2026-02-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Washington state DOT uses it to post pictures for construction progress updates to this day. It\u2019s great!", "excerpt": "Interestingly, Washington state DOT uses it to post pictures for construction progress updates to this day. It\u2019s great! https://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme"}, {"id": 754145392, "item_id": 47134087, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47134087", "by": "socalgal2", "date": "2026-02-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I wouldn't because then you'd had have https://flickr.com/settings", "excerpt": "> I would also try to add a human-readable slug at the end, because\u2026 No? Because what would it be based on and if you edited the thing that it's based on then the URL would either change, or get out of sync which woudl suck. You could ignore the suffix meaning flickr.com/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904-<everything-past-the-previous-dash-is-ignored> I'm not sure if that would be a positive, although I guess S.O. does ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme"}, {"id": 754025121, "item_id": 47126570, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126570", "by": "munificent", "date": "2026-02-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Eventually, I moved to Flickr, which at the time was an actual community", "excerpt": "100%. You don't even need to give people money. It's about attention and feedback. People post photos on Instagram and status updates on Facebook because their friends will see it there and give it a thumbs up. A couple of decades ago, I spent a lot of time laboriously building a website for scratch for my photography. It was objectively a really nice site. I had my own domain, hosted it on a VPS, and put a ton of wo", "context": "", "use_case": "Photo sharing", "switched_from": "", "story": "A simple web we own"}, {"id": 742781313, "item_id": 46423832, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46423832", "by": "ajdude", "date": "2025-12-29", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I wanted to move away from flickr", "excerpt": "Also a plex pass holder. Been using it for years, and finally pulled the trigger to buy Plex pass lifetime because I wanted to move away from flickr and love that I could automatically upload photos taken on my phone to Plex. ... not a week later they've announced that they were getting rid of that feature Then they forced everybody into having us username accounts, change things so I couldn't just visit my media ser", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "Flickr", "story": "Self-hosting is being enshittified"}, {"id": 737304304, "item_id": 46081519, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081519", "by": "JohnBooty", "date": "2025-11-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've had a Flickr account for about 20 years.", "excerpt": "videos in the \"woman with large breasts not wearing a bra does something mundane\" genre with multiple millions of views. Anecdata: even if they're wearing bras and not dressed in a revealing way and it's a still photo... the views will pour in. I've had a Flickr account for about 20 years. I used to run a community and I took a lot of pictures at our gatherings, which were primarily 20-somethings. Some photos had 100", "context": "used to run a community", "use_case": "Photo sharing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bringing Sexy Back. Internet surveillance has killed eroticism"}]}