Consider for a moment that the pro/prosumer market is large enough to sustain several businesses which have much higher per-sale costs. Look at all of the camera gear companies out there. Definitely a sustainable business, but Flickr needs some serious rebranding and updating. They need to hammer in to users that putting photos from your $4,000 camera rig on Facebook is just silly.

>They need to hammer in to users that putting photos from your $4,000 camera rig on Facebook is just silly.

The people putting photos into facebook don't have $4000 camera rigs. They have $500-1000 camera rigs, and the photos that they're taking are [often] taken using the pop-up flash, the kit lens, and automatic mode.

For them, putting photos into facebook is a completely reasonable thing to do, and their photos wouldn't gain anything by being stored on flickr.

Sounds like you guys agree:

IF you are a professional THEN flickr is the place for you. However, IF you are an amateur THEN Facebook is just fine.

We all agree that if you're taking a picture with a $4000 camera you lose something by throwing that up on Facebook.

I think this is it. Flickr content is much more searchable via tags, Facebook not so much. The focus in Flickr is subject matter and actual photography, with Facebook it's more about people and experiences within networks. Many Facebook photos are uninteresting to people other than the friends of the originator.

Publishers regularly search Flickr for photos to license and use. I'm a point-and-click shooter, but out of the blue I received two messages asking to publish one of my photos (which I had tagged descriptively). I was paid, and I learned how to complete invoices and W-9s, and had the joy of seeing my photo published with credit in a food magazine no one reads (Whole Foods sold it briefly). Yahoo could better highlight Flickr's ability to connect publishers with casual photo-takers, by facilitating thorough tagging of photo contents and improving the search ability. Flickr's definitely a much larger and open body of content than Facebook for this purpose.

There's (at least) one more level of granularity between professional and amateur though -- prosumer. Camera gear <$4000 && >$1000; a serious hobbiest if you will. I think the GP was saying that Flickr should market harder to that vertical, which makes sense to me because it's so much larger than the pros.

I consider myself a semi-serious hobbiest, my rig fits into the conditions above, and I still pay for my Pro account. I post a link to the album on Facebook, though.

> The people putting photos into facebook don't have $4000 camera rigs. They have $500-1000 camera rigs

If you're lucky. Mostly it's pictures off an iPhone or equivalent.

An iPhone is, among other things, a $500-1000 camera rig.

Yes, an iPhone is in that price range and is a camera among other things. However it's different from a $500 camera in a lot of ways - people buy them for lots of other purposes (texts, facebook, apps, angry birds, even voice) and pay for them on instalments via the contract. Many people come to taking pictures without having ever thought they were buying a camera, let alone putting down $500+ on one. People who would hate how technical a DSLR is love how simple and fun instagram is.

The camera in a smartphone is comparable to a $200 mid-range compact ( http://www.amazon.com/Nikon-COOLPIX-Digital-Camera-Optical/d... ) but not to $600 low-end DSLR ( http://www.amazon.com/Canon-Digital-18-55mm-75-300mm-Telepho... ) In fact the compact will have better zoom, flash, more megapixels... It will win on most metrics except ability to upload instantly.

Except those photographers are more likely to put their photos on Smugmug. Yahoo may have let too much air out of the Flikr balloon for it to be able to float.

Very true. There's little reason they couldn't aggressively attack that space though.

In my mind, Flickr is to Facebook what Vimeo is to YouTube. It's a community, not a storage system.

I think the pro and "prosumer" photo community is plenty of room for a cool product with features targeted at their niche audience. Curation, craft, camera nerdery, etc.

Flickr just isn't evolving their product as well for photographers as Vimeo is for video folks. It's sad, really.

There's the photography community and then there's everyone else. For everyone else there's Facebook (don't mind shitty photo quality and management). I'm no fan of Instagram, and even if I was, I wouldn't stop using a DSLR.

I've been with Flickr for years now, am a Pro user, and nothing else comes close for a photography enthusiast. IMHO all it would take is few key redesigns and better mobile apps that would make the photography community really happy to stick with it.

And that's the thing: most people don't mind about photo quality (beyond a certain point) and most people don't care about management (beyond being able to make albums and tag people.

Flickr was the only option for a while, so they captured say 60% of people who published photographs online. Of that 60%, many were pro but a lot were consumer. When better alternatives for the consumers came along, they left. And it looks like regression on Flickr's part.

Actually I'd say that Flickr is now in a niche which it could make money from pretty well: if people stop expecting it to be the business it once was.

> Facebook (don't mind shitty photo quality and management)

And Facebook could upgrade that experience in about five minutes if they start getting threatened on that front.

Improving photo quality would be expensive at their volume.

Improving photo management is not in their interest. Having a small number of photos that are easily accessible increases engagement, because people interact more if they're looking at the same photos (comments, etc.) If they made it easy for people to navigate to separate places in a large photo collection, they'd need new ways to push people towards interacting with each other.

> Improving photo quality would be expensive at their volume.

Sure, but getting left behind as the photo sharing platform of choice is much more expensive. Also, they might make it a paid-for service. Flickr Pro is like $20/month? Facebook PhotoHD could probably be $5/month.

> That leaves Flickr to scrounge over the pro and prosumer photographers. Are there enough pro/prosumer level photographers?

And in that space smugmug and 500px are also aiming at the DSLR owners who are willing to pay double-digit $ per year.

You say that as if it's a bad thing. Competition raises awareness. Flickr could benefit from the existence of smugmug and 500px.

Competition is usually a good thing for consumers. And it probably is in this case, except right now I have the choice in making an account on smugmug where one prosumer photographer friend puts his pictures, 500px where another semi-pro photographer friend hangs out, or of flickr where several other friends who mostly have compact cameras are. That's not ideal.

While it's possible that Flickr could benefit from the existence of smugmug and 500px, IMHO it's more likely that one or more of this group of competitors will eventually be forced out of business, especially as the grandparent post makes the point that due to facebook, instagram etc, these sites are now catering to a niche. Of the three (flickr, 500px, smugmug) only flickr has the scent of failure on it. I hope they shake it off, but which one would you pick as a winner?

Facebook killed Flickr for casual users, stop.

That's all you need to say really. Flickr isn't about casual users. It's about the interface, categorization, and other usability features specific to photography that other platforms don't offer.

500px competes in someways, but the 500px interface is to "iOS" for me. Sometimes we don't want a cut down interface, we want all the power of a "desktop" interface - even if it is a website.

I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or not :)

Flickr isn't about casual users, but for a while it was bloated by casual users which made it look like a site with really big potential.

"I want to make the photo storage/sharing site for all people who take photos" is a bigger proposition (and potentially more lucrative) than "I want to make the photo storage/sharing site for all pro/prosumer photographers".

For a while people were judging Flickr by the fact that it had users from both camps. Then the consumers left and Flickr looked anaemic.

I'd even reduce that to flickr being usable for prosumers. I don't think there's much of a pro play there at all, in it's current state.

That said, I do think there's still an opportunity. I'd like to have a portable repository to back up and provide a home-base for archiving family/wedding/vacation photos at high resolution. Somewhere I can choose to share them to facebook, or also visa-versa.. something that sucks my instagram and facebook uploads over so that I could drop my accounts on those sites tomorrow without losing the content.

The big attraction, for me, is the groups and the discussions therein (i.e. the community), however, the tools they provide for these interactions are primitive.

The photos it imports from Instagram and Facebook would not be high resolution.

I think you're right to question the profit potential of an improved Flickr. But I think there's still room for a massive archival service that is separated from Facebook and handles the kind of instant photography provided by Instagram. Instagram's photo archiving interface is still pretty limited.

I think if you ask the average digital camera owner what happened to all the photos they took, they would say they haven't yet downloaded them from the card, nevermind uploaded them and categorized/described them. I use Adobe Lightroom to manage this process, but it's still klunky, even for a prosumer like me.

Facebook has a huge advantage with its social network...but it's not yet designed to handle photos (i.e. there's no searching for photos, albums are limited to 200 photos, jpg compression is poor, and you can't label/categorize photos). A service that provides a slick way to archive and manage massive amount of photos is still needed by the average user. In fact, I'd say the need has grown, as photo-taking opporutnities have exponentially grown, without a corresponding growth in photo-archiving services.

Dropbox is not a real alternative, except as a backup.

I don't think there's a lot of crossover between those verticals: people who want to share photos with friends, people who want to backup photos, people who want to categorise and tag specific photos [beyond what Facebook provides].

And I think each of them is well catered for by Facebook with the exception of organisational features beyond what Facebook offers.

But what you're describing is a photo-optimised interface for Dropbox, not Flickr. Flickr was (and still is) about communities around photographs. And they have failed at that.

I agree. It seems like there would be some opportunity for a revitalized Flickr to integrate with Facebook but also to include the more professional feature set.

Please forgive my ignorance but does iOS provide access for third party applications to Photo Stream? It would be great to provide a mobile application to connect to an Eye-Fi card when the phone is plugged in to automatically upload to different services (Flickr, Photo Stream, etc.)