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.
Secondly, it makes use of and exposes EXIF data. I really, really lament the Instagrammification of online photography, where the only aspect ration was 1:1, terrible resolution, no EXIF data, and certainly no easy way to link a photo to anything outside of Instagram. That EXIF data makes it so much easier to search photos - although it could do with some AI autotagging. Surely that's coming down the pike...
Lastly, it's like an internet time capsule. There are accounts that started in the early 2000s and haven't been touched since the 2010s, and you can still pull full resolution imagery from there. And there are people even more old fashioned (and probably even more old) than me, still uploading new photos and old slides.
It sucks that Yahoo didn't do anything with Instagram, but I'm glad it also managed to avoid completely destroying it.
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/
Nowadays, I have a locally hosted Immich instance. It's great as personal photo archive, but is missing the social features.
To be honest, with the advent of GenAI, I'm now reluctant to share my photos publicly because I don't like the feeling that my work will be slurped up for AI model training..
In the end, I just built my own photo blog on Hugo with SveltiaCMS (thanks Claude). I don't care much about the social part per se, just want a place to host my photo journeys.
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... although I see that artificially-looking landscapes still dominate their "trending" page (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags).
Anyway, my general takeaway is that things are more interesting on photo sites where engagement isn't driven primarily by a global popularity ranking. You just come across thought-provoking work more often.
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.
I remember that time I reported someone for reposting my images.
Flickr's response was deleting my profile, all of my photos, and not responding to any of my attempts to contact them.
On the upside, it was a good lesson to not trust service providers.
https://github.com/cooliris/embed-wall
If you're on MacOS, you can run the file with this software:
This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities. In ten or so years, everybody will use it for multimedia.
Pretty disappointed my Pro subscription somehow increased by 60% this year. That's pretty uncool. I guess all the crippling of free accounts still hasn't reduced costs enough, or something. It's bad enough you can never see original size on free accounts anymore (even though I'm now paying $135/year!), apparently reduction in functionality that was theoretically supposed to keep costs down still hasn't prevented a continual escalation of Pro subscription cost (regardless of my minimal usage of the site).
It was atrocious.
Single handedly created a lot of issues for anyone maintaining old cars…
Zuck purely bought it to murder competition in the crib
I'm not going to sign up for it just because he put a hard login wall ("look at how many users we have!")
He kills art, he kills organic reach, all his products turn into spam, 97 ads per real post
It's been such a tragedy that we now have such good quality cameras, yet all the media we consume is incredibly downscaled and compressed to save money.
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.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...
Elrond?
I agree with that. And then I moved to 500px, and it was the same. Started off promising, became very homogenous. Landscapes like you say, and the People sections were heavy with Eastern European semi-soft focus nudes in nature.
I work on climate technology (sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky), and I have a side quest to create a "Freedom to Breathe" mural in Manhattan before the upcoming New York Climate Week. Might be up your alley knowing artists and photographers. How interested are you in working together on making a mural?
fwiw, a lot of markdown parsers allow some amount of HTML also.
Pasting a html img tag into your markdown documents might work, depending on which parser is used.
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.
They deleted all but the newest 100 or so for the free accounts
I cannot understand this mindset. People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages.
We have lots of work to do, and I think most of the criticisms are fair and on our road map. Small team, working hard, listening to customers. Like we've been doing for 24 years. (We're bootstrapped and privately owned, never taken VC).
AMA.
If any more recent post exist on similar topics, I’d be fascinated to read more.
I seem to recall a buyout and some kind of 'certain things are no longer allowed' changes.
Similar thing happened with tumblr, then they semi-reversed a little but not a lot I think.
Stopped using both because losing content and accounts with no customer support is the internet way apparently.
I want to share my photos under a free license, but the one thing that always put me off Flickr was that I would have to pay an indefinite subscription to contribute to the commons.
I do a lot of event photography as a creative outlet. I want my friends to be able to download individual photos and photo albums easily. As an example, I just photographed a fundraiser for my rugby team last week, and I made all my shots available in a Google Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PfwHpEJejywBRiZp7
And while that works, I don’t necessarily love feeding all my creative content into the Google machine. I would rather support a diverse photography ecosystem.
Have you explored making downloading individual photos and albums a prominent feature? Mind you, I realize I am weird photographer who does this stuff for free, and I don’t care about attribution or watermarks. I just want my friends to be able to get their photos easily.
To some degree I only still pay for it out of nostalgia for what it was. I stopped using it when it started trying to upload my entire camera roll every time I opened the mobile app - Flickr was never about storing all your photos on someone else's server, it was about curation and community. It somewhat lost that as phone photography got more popular, and instead of empowering users to do that directly on their phone, it presented itself as a mere backup utility. The app seems to be entirely non-functional now, no content loads at all for me. Flickr's failure to move with the rise mobile photography feels like its biggest misstep - age verification for an account that is 22 years old though might actually convince me to stop paying. I'm not using it, the mobile app is broken, and now it wants to hand my PII to a third party.
It would really be crazy if they did that, but they claimed that limiting the number of photos users could upload, instead of limiting the quality, somehow made it more like a social media platform.
If the Flickr app had had a "quick upload" flow like Instagram, they might have had a chance but (like almost everything Yahoo! did) they fumbled badly and wasted any potential they had.
For example: https://www.furtrack.com/index/species:fennec_fox
Tens, hundreds of photos for each suit, but almost no views.
That makes no sense. It’s very obviously been nurtured and grown by orders of magnitude since acquisition.
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 don't think it works anymore. His revenue and hits went crazy after Veronica Belmont talked about it.
https://brajeshwar.com/2011/bulkr-access-and-backup-your-fli...
as someone who goes down many rabbit holes on wikipedia, i appreciate this comment and all of those CC photos
People, yes. The possibility of one person using a copyrighted work that I uploaded to the internet is very different in scope to that of a corporation with billions of dollars in funding using the same work to generate a product that automates the creation of similar such works.
The photos are still there. I don't have PRO and my 2772 images can still be seen, even by logged out visitors. I can't upload anything though.
Enforcement is another things but photographers and artists have had ways to push back against illicit use of their work, notably by larger corporations. Licensing is an industry based on this protection alone.
The difference is that now, large corporations with plenty of money are able to just swallow other people’s work and pretend it’s “fair use” and derivative enough that they wash their hand of the fact that their models, that they charge lots of money for, would not be able to output anything they were not trained on. At least you could argue that a large image model would have a hard time creating a picture of a cat if it hadn’t been fed pictures of cats that belonged to other people than the company producing the model.
I don’t know if training on the world’s data without compensation is fair or not. There are valid arguments both ways, but as an individual, it should still be your choice whether you want to allow your work to be used in ways you do not agree with.
I think people at large expect at least recognition, and if possible, compensation, for their creations.
When a consumption system is built around providing neither, I don’t think we should be surprised that people feel slighted.
Right? On the one hand there was the mystery of what might happen with your photos and on the other there is the plain, inescapable knowledge that they will be donated to like four dude’s tech companies to make money off of without acknowledgement or compensation. That’s basically the same thing
Please.
Not everything is allowed, though - here's the list: https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/20529310987796-...
We do have real, human, in-house customer support. It's good and fast.
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.
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 to markdown and won't accept an HTML embed.
My current solution is to convert the following by hand from something like
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/uname/1234/" title="My Title"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/1234/abcd.jpg" width="1024" height="768" alt="My Alt Text" /></a>
To: [](www.flickr.com/photos/uname/1234)
For every photo I like to share which can be a lot when I am blogging...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 :-)
>It's probably even more photographer-oriented
not even remotely serious? ridiculous
As I think the article captured pretty well, we could make a lot more money if we went the algorithmic-privacy-violating route, but we don't want to. So we aren't.
Since we never raised a round of funding, as long as the bills are getting paid, we can do what we want - build a company for the long-term based on a great photography community. So that's what we're doing. :)
And while I think the site strikes the balance decently at the moment, Pro is too expensive for ads to get more intrusive (for the Pro user and for others looking at his/her photos).
But as I hope was clear, I'm a big supporter and would love to see the platform continue to thrive. If you're ever looking to bounce thoughts off a user, or anything else, I'm happy to help!
(I am not really mad at them btw.)
Is this true? Remember that Harlan Ellison plagiarism case, the nightmare he went through to get a payout? It seems the vast majority of times, when a corporation decides it wants to use something you created, it gets to just do so because it has more capital than you.
Alas, Flickr wouldn't even be alive if we hadn't increased the price ($$) and value (features) of Pro relative to things like intrusive ads on free accounts, etc. The very reason it's alive is because we have intrusive ads on free accounts, but no ads on Pro accounts, including for viewers. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
We have some great plans to further increase Pro's value, but we disagree that Pro is too expensive. Relative to our peers, it's a bargain for unlimited storage, advertising free, etc etc.
Love to bounce future ideas off of you, and thanks for the article!
Yes, it is.
I'm a previous career, I was a professional photographer. I spent a lot of time chasing after companies that operated with the "if it's in the internet, it must be free" mindset. The right letters, sent the right way, to the right people almost always gets things fixed.
In one example, a very major bank used one of my photos as the cover of a corporate report. That mistake paid my rent for a little over a year.
People were making that exact criticism of Microsoft Windows for decades.
It's only really in the last decade that Windows got decent enough at security for this attitude to wear off.
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As the global population of photographers swells, so do their digital libraries, leaving everyone with the same question: where and how to share their best work. Flickr was among the first online communities designed to address that dilemma, and it remains one of the best. Some demand sweeping overhauls or argue the price isn’t justified.
However, Flickr’s refusal to chase fleeting trends—opting instead for iterative improvements—is actually one of its greatest strengths. And while its annual Pro subscription is on the pricier side, ultimately, the benefits continue to outweigh the costs.
Editor’s Note: This article was written largely as a rebuttal to Matt Payne’s January 2026 article, Empty Promises: A Deep Dive into Flickr Pro for 2026. It is worth familiarizing yourself with that perspective before diving into Mr. Weinstein’s response below.
Launched in 2004 with an iconically missing vowel, Flickr pioneered the Web 2.0 era of social photo sharing before enduring a decade of minor and cosmetic changes amid corporate stasis under Yahoo.
In 2013, Yahoo made a splashy announcement that it was refreshing the user interface and would offer all users one terabyte of free photo space. But the longer Yahoo held onto Flickr, the more the platform’s continued existence was in question.
After years of neglect, SmugMug acquired the platform in 2018. Don MacAskill, SmugMug’s CEO, said “[w]e’ll work very hard to not ruin Flickr. After successfully not ruining it, we’ll work even hard[er] to make it better than its already awesome self,” and “Flickr’s community is unique in the world and on the Internet. That’s where we’d like to invest.” So, what are the results of those investments, and is Flickr Pro still worth it?
In stark contrast to the majority of photo-focused services, Flickr remains primarily a simple photo-sharing website where one can find friends and view their work in a clean, chronological stream. While the platform supports video, the feature feels like a quiet afterthought—a logical choice for a site built by and for photography enthusiasts. There is simply no chance that Flickr will suddenly pivot to video to chase short-form trends.
Flickr groups exist for countless topics, including street photography.
The heart of the Flickr community lies in its Groups, many of which cater to highly specific niches that you won’t find elsewhere. These range from technical communities focused on specific lenses, camera bodies, or brands, to aesthetic enclaves for analog purists, black-and-white enthusiasts, and quirkier corners like Stick Figures in Peril.
Flickr’s EXIF data and geotags help users see where and how photos were taken.
The platform’s utility is bolstered by its robust handling of tags and geotagging, allowing for a level of searchability that modern social media often lacks. Users can manage their libraries through Sets, Galleries, and Albums, making it easy to organize thousands of images by subject matter, location, person, or era. Flickr preserves and displays comprehensive EXIF data, including detailed camera and lens information for every shot.
Flickr also retains its early web roots: every user has an RSS feed, and the site maintains open APIs and makes it simple to create embeds for other websites—a lingering reminder of the flexible features that made early Flickr such a vital tool for bloggers and curators.
Explore has the potential to bring thousands of viewers to a photo.
Of course, there’s also Explore, Flickr’s way of highlighting 500 photos each day. When a photo is selected for Explore—driven by an inscrutable, often mercurial algorithm—it typically receives thousands of views and a surge of engagement.
In 2026, the leap from a free account to Flickr Pro primarily allows a user to present a long-term or large body of work publicly. The most immediate benefit is the removal of the 1,000-photo cap (which also limits free users to a mere 50 non-public photos), replaced by unlimited, full-resolution JPEG storage. For those who use Flickr as a portfolio, the Pro status also ensures an ad-free experience—not just for the photographer, but for anyone visiting their photostream, ensuring the work remains the sole focus without the distraction of third-party banners.
Pro users also gain access to Advanced Stats, providing granular data on the sources of views and traffic, including which specific groups or tags are driving traffic. Pro members get a suite of partner perks, including savings on Adobe Creative Cloud, Blurb photo books, Phlearn memberships, and SmugMug plans, and a significant 5% off gear at KEH. Additionally, Pro members gain access to exclusive savings on a wide range of classes and education. These are, at best, fringe benefits, but a user who spends a bit under $2,000 at KEH in a year will have essentially justified the entire cost of the Pro membership through the discount.
There are certainly cheaper ways in 2026 to host an ad-free, public portfolio on the open web. Yet, few to none meet those criteria while simultaneously offering an active, built-in community of dedicated photography enthusiasts seeking out high quality photography. I suspect that’s the value proposition that keeps many Flickr users paying for Pro in 2026, myself included.
Other options are better positioned to present a professional photographer’s work to the world exactly as they want it seen. But Flickr Pro shouldn’t be confused with “Flickr for professionals,” just like the iPhone Pro isn’t intended for “professional smartphone users.” Most Flickr users are serious—or not-so-serious—hobbyists.
But more generally, Flickr is great precisely because it isn’t trying to become the next Instagram, TikTok, crypto play, metaverse experiment, or AI training ground. While it’s always nice to have exposure on Flickr, the platform is largely devoid of the “influencers” who dominate other networks. In an era of algorithm-driven content, Flickr remains a sanctuary for photography enthusiasts who are genuinely excited to see what their peers are up to. The community remains very active; while you’ll encounter the occasional robotic “Great shot!” comment, the platform still fosters engaged discussion, honest feedback, and shared tips that are hard to find on more transactional social networks. If it feels like a ghost town, consider joining new groups and interacting with new users whose work you enjoy and might learn from.
The robust tagging and geotagging systems make Flickr an underappreciated platform for location scouting. Before heading to a new area, a user can search within the area or for specific landmarks to see how a location looks at different times of day, in varying weather conditions, or across different seasons. Furthermore, the full EXIF data display makes Flickr a great place to learn. There is no better place to see what a different lens or camera body can produce in the hands of real photographers.
Flickr makes it easy to assign a Creative Commons license to photos.
One of Flickr’s most underrated power features is the Organize tool. It provides a high-level view of your entire library, allowing you to batch-edit titles, tags, and permissions with a simple drag-and-drop interface, ensuring every photo has the exact attributes you want it to. Flickr offers robust features to limit who sees your work, allowing you to hide specific photos from public searches while still sharing them with a select circle via private links. And it’s easy to change the license associated with photos in bulk, for instance to assign a Creative Commons license so others can share or reuse your work if you so choose.
To support the sense of community, Flickr regularly hosts free photography competitions that celebrate its members’ talent, including the annual Your Best Shot contest and themed events like the World Photography Day Contest. Flickr often hands out prizes, big and small, in conjunction with popular photo-related brands. And photos entered into contests often get a boost in interaction from other participants—a nice consolation prize.
Flickr organized photo walks for various anniversaries of the platform, including for its 10th anniversary.
Flickr supports its community in the real world too. The site facilitates photo walks, sponsors Photoville in New York City, and maintains a presence at major photography gatherings. These events are excellent opportunities to meet like-minded photographers, swap stories about gear, and discover new subjects to shoot. I’ve personally met avid Flickr users in places like New York City, Atlanta, and London; it’s a true global network. While it’s a rarely used feature, if a photo uploaded to the site contains another Flickr member, you can tag that user directly, making it easy to keep track of friends and collaborators from real-world photowalks.
The site is also heavily promoting MODE by Flickr, a three-day photography festival taking place in Minneapolis from September 18–20, 2026. Billed as a “photographer’s playground,” MODE is designed to bring the community away from their devices and into the physical world through workshops, darkroom sessions, and city-wide photowalks. At a minimum of $330 for admission, plus airfare to and lodging in Minnesota, MODE may prove to be a one-time experiment, but it’s a genuine effort to invigorate the community, which is worthy of praise.
And while Explore is and has been algorithmically curated for years, the site is generally free of artificial intelligence, both with respect to the content users upload and useless features shoehorned into the service. Flickr’s Terms make clear that users own the copyright to their photos:
You retain all intellectual property rights in and to any User Content you post, upload or otherwise make available through the Services, including the copyright in and to your photos and videos. SmugMug does not claim any ownership, right, title or interest in and to your User Content.
While users grant SmugMug the right to reproduce users’ images to provide the service there’s little risk—at least under the current Terms—that Flickr will turn into an AI-focused platform, mining its users’ photos. Of course, third parties may take a different view and scrape the full Flickr corpus, but there’s only so much Flickr, like virtually every website operator, can do with respect to that scenario.
While Flickr has dabbled in allowing users to license photos, commerce has never been the core element of the service. Today, rather than acting as a middleman for stock sales, as do many of its competitors, Flickr focuses on providing the infrastructure for photographers to manage their own destinies. Ultimately, Flickr’s greatest strength in 2026 is its refusal to pivot or sell out.
While Flickr has an impressive list of attributes, it is far from flawless. When SmugMug acquired the service and migrated its massive library to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the platform entered a period of relative instability. Even in 2026, users occasionally encounter the dreaded “bad panda”—Flickr’s internal parlance for a site error or outage—and intermittent slow-loading pages remain an unfortunate reality of the browsing experience. A fully functional platform is table stakes, especially for the price Pro users pay.
A meetup of New York City-based Flickr users.
Flickr Groups used to feature robust conversations, but much of that energy has migrated to platforms like Reddit or Facebook. While many groups remain active—specifically those centered around local photography clubs, specific social organizations, and regional events—the broader “global” discussion feels quieter than it once was. Similarly, the internal FlickrMail messaging system has not seen a significant update in years; it lacks conveniences like multi-person threads or the ability to easily embed photos and map locations directly into a chat. The SmugMug management promised improvements to the community aspects of Flickr, and more is needed—beyond a pricey, experimental festival in Minnesota—before they can declare success on this front.
Some of the site’s most beloved legacy features are beginning to show their age. The Camera Finder, for example, is still a useful resource for seeing trending gear, but it lacks granular data or the ability to filter in any useful way.It used to be possible to filter photos taken by a specific camera by genre (e.g., landscape, sports). Restoring this feature—and building out robust searchability by camera body, lens, and exact settings—would be a massive win for the community.
The World Map lets users scout locations around the world well before arrival.
The World Map could also use attention. While geotags are a fantastic resource, the World Map currently lacks the filtering and searchability that would make it a much more powerful and useful way to find photos with certain keywords at a specific place at a specific time.
The “Interestingness” algorithm—which powers the Explore page—can be enigmatic. While tastes vary, virtually everyone can agree that the algorithm sometimes rewards objectively mundane photos as more “interesting” than more captivating work. I suspect that the algorithm is tuned to reward certain user behaviors that Flickr considers desirable at the expense of showcasing truly “interesting” photos. While some users have long since learned to game the system, complaining about Explore is an old cliché—and it ultimately represents only a fraction of the platform’s value. Nonetheless, improvements would be welcome.
Flickr supports photos with wide embedded color spaces, including ProPhoto RGB, so modern displays can show photos uploaded to Flickr with extremely rich colors.
Flickr allows Pro users to showcase their work at full resolution, but as of 2026, JPEG is over 30 years old, and camera and display hardware has surpassed its limitations. While Flickr doesn’t overly compress photos and does support modern color profiles—allowing the service to take advantage of wide gamuts like Display P3 used by high-end smartphones and monitors—it still lacks native support for next-generation formats like JPEG XL, HEIC, or AVIF. These formats are increasingly supported and commonplace, offer better compression and greater bit depths, and adding them would significantly modernize the platform’s technical foundation.
There is an old adage in tech: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Through that lens, Flickr Pro users are definitively not the product. Currently, Flickr Pro costs $82 when billed once per year, which is a significant jump from its early days. To put that in perspective, 500px is $59.94 per year, and Glass, a recent entrant in the field sometimes considered Flickr’s closest competitor, costs roughly $40 per year. On the other hand, they lack the full feature set described above, and they don’t offer their Pro-level users an ad-free gallery space open to the public that doesn’t generate its profit by profiling its users for advertisers.
Hosting petabytes of high-resolution data is an expensive endeavor—Yahoo should have never offered terabytes of storage for free. MacAskill addressed this balance directly when speaking to the community about two years ago:
“Flickr is the healthiest it’s ever been. More active users, more engagement, more connections, more revenue, more of everything – except people treating it like a photo dump’. Most importantly, our members are ecstatic about it, it’s now profitable and cash flow positive, so not in imminent danger (and we’re trying to build it, sustainably, for 100+ years). IMHO, it’s not nearly enough, yet, but the trajectory is awesome. It’s working. And it’s working without invading people’s privacy, unlike nearly every other social media platform.”
He’s also been clear very recently that SmugMug is “not planning on selling Flickr.” Ultimately, while the site may feel rusty in a few places, its trajectory suggests a platform that is finally stable. For those who value privacy, a long-term home for their work, and an ad-free portfolio-like space, the Pro price tag is the cost of ensuring Flickr survives into the next decade and beyond.
It’s not officially a part of Flickr, but the closely affiliated non-profit Flickr Foundation is working on projects like the Data Lifeboat, which aims to be a “user-friendly archiving solution to ensure memories on Flickr can be enjoyed by future generations, in easily browsable packages.”
Flickr may seem like an anachronism in 2026, but the things that made it great decades ago continue to make it the best platform for sharing photos today.
If you’re looking for the next big thing, Flickr may not be for you. Flickr is great because—in contrast to virtually all of its competitors—it offers the features photography enthusiasts care about while avoiding distractions and minimal monetization of its Pro users via advertising. It’s a community with virtual and real-world events. It’s a place to post and seek out your favorite photos. It’s a place to be inspired. Because it isn’t (currently) beholden to massive shareholder demands, it hasn’t needed to “move fast and break things.” Instead, it has moved deliberately, maintaining and improving the tools that matter. I expect to see more of that going forward and will willingly pay the (admittedly high) fee necessary to keep this little slice of the early, more pure web alive—not for the sake of nostalgia, but because things actually were better back when the web connected real people, and platforms didn’t aspire to take over the world. In short, if it’s not broken, why fix it?
About the author: Brett Weinstein is an amateur photographer and will mark 20 years of Flickr membership this year. His work is featured in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, he was the Photography Editor at the Emory Wheel and the 2008 Southeast Journalism Conference Best Press Photographer, and his photos have been listed with Getty and featured in press and advertising. By day, he is a privacy and consumer protection lawyer. The opinions expressed above are solely those of the author.
Further case law established that I - a human - can create original work, if you are a non-human entity such as an LLM, or a monkey taking a picture, you cannot.