I still have my account and old photos there. And because I licensed most of them as CC, a couple of them landed on Wikipedia because of that - felt nice.
as someone who goes down many rabbit holes on wikipedia, i appreciate this comment and all of those CC photos
The elegance of flickr is just nice and browsing is fun.
I wonder if there are more sites like it.
It’s cool that they used PHP, I always thought it was RoR platform.
From my point of view Yahoo destroyed Flickr. I was a happy user for many years and lost access to my photos due to authentication changes. At least Google had the decency to just shut down Reader as opposed to Yahoo's enshittification of a product that sparked joy.
The community isn’t the same of course, but the platform itself is a joy to use again - especially as someone who got tired of Instagram when it stopped being about photography.
I really loved all the places where they snuck in "Game Never Ending" in the product, because they didn't set out to make a photo sharing product, but steered hard into that.
Flickr was the only property which was allowed their own version of PHP and despite having PHP inside, every single URL said ".gne" (Game Never Ending). I worked for the PHP team and that was my only excuse to show up to work in the SF office instead of being stuck in Sunnyvale when visiting the US.
They had all the right bits of architecture built out - rest of Yahoo had great code (like vespa or the graph behind Yahoo 360), but everything was more complex than it should be.
Flickr had the simplest possible approach that worked and they tried it before building anything more complex - the image urls, the resize queues, the way albums were stored, machine-tags, gps co-ordinates.
I also took a lot of photos to put up on flickr, trying to get featured on the explore page up front - it was like getting published in a magazine.
Every presentation I made had CC images backed by flickr, it was a true commons to share and take.
And then Instagram happened.