I’ve always been very close to my Flickr account. I love photography and love uploading my pictures and seeing them on that clean mosaic all a the same time… But I have to admit I’ve been feeling a little disillusioned with Flickr lately. When I first joined the site, it was right at the peak of my photography phase and ended up buying a professional account 3 days later – at the time it was a big deal because I was on a student’s budget and that was about two weeks shopping but hey… that was how much I loved Flickr. But as that love has gone cold I now find myself making a list of all the things that crept in and pushed us apart…
1. Video
I know I’m going to sound like an old man here, but things really were better in the old days. Flickr just used to be about photography. I went there because I just wanted to look at and be inspired by amazing photographs. I loved the design because it was simple and clean and it was just about photography. I just used to log in and see all my photos laid out in that trademark Flickr mosaic style and felt great. Now that they’ve introduced video, it just doesn’t seem to go with the photography aspect even though the videos are only 30 seconds and are referred to as ‘moving photos I can’t help feeling it’s all a little bit pointless really…
2 Explore
One of my main problems with Flickr is with it’s main features. The Explore feature is meant to find ineresting photography and show the best of what Flickr has to show on any given day, except it seems to totally have stopped showing anything interesting. It’s the same thing every day, a picture of a cat, a picture of a dog, someone’s baby, a sunset, some bokeh out of focus stuff and a vintage effected picture of some woman on her bed with a dumb poem and enigmatic title. And don’t get me started on HDRs…
3. HDR(i)s or tonemapped images.
There’s no words I can find to express my distaste for HDRI or tone-mapped images. The over saturated, over used effect seems to have some hold on people over at Flickr. Try doing any search for any picture on any topic, and see if a tacky HDR doesn’t dominat e the first 20 images that pop up.
4. Awards.
When I first joined flickr, the awards felt like thy meant something. Now it’s like anyone with an account can just set up some tacky looking award and try to get you to add to their groups pool, it’s getting almost as bad as spam.
5. Flickr Celebrities.
There are some people of Flickr who just get an insane amount of comments and attention on their photos, but without actually having anything good about their photos. Before it was about the photos and they photography. You could trust the feedback you recieved because it was genuine. If your photo was rubbish, sooner or later someone will tell you it’s rubbish, and you went back to the drawing board and you came back a better photographer. Now each page is filled ass-kissing comments to talentless photographers which ends up a sad situation of the blind leading the blind.
It is a pity because photography can be enjoyable when you experience a really good photo, but because low quality photos get so much praise, people thing Thats the standard they should set for themselves and the standard of work ends up dropping rapidly. Once a great destination for creativity, inspiration and photography, now only good for backing up your images online.
