Resurrecting My Flickr Account
Now that I’m taking more photos again, I’ve resurrected my Flickr account to share them! I considered a number of options for sharing my photos:
- I quickly decided to avoid the tech behemoths Meta and Google.¹
- That avoidance notwithstanding, my existing Instagram account wouldn’t work anyway since I do share the occasional photo there, but it’s not the right place for sharing or perusing large albums, e.g., 171 photos from a week at camp.
- A number of people made good suggestions to me on Mastodon including Immich and Ente.
- I considered and even got partway into building photo gallery sharing functionality into this website (powered by 11ty).
Ultimately I went with Flickr because it was the quickest option I was considering that wasn’t owned by Meta/Google. I also really like that it’s been around for 20 years with almost unchanged functionality. In particular I like that I’ve had an account with them since I was in high school 20 years ago. It’s minor, but there’s a little bit of satisfaction I get from seeing the “Joined 2005” bug on my profile.²
It feels like a service that launched with a guiding star that it never lost, even through multiple acquisitions, and speaks well to its stability; it feels uncommonly rare to encounter social media platforms that aren’t trying to consume the world and like something I want to support. They even have a foundation devoted to maintaining the Flickr archive long term, which is incredibly cool.
It’s not all sunshine and daisies, unfortunately. The website feels like it still follows a lot of Web 2.0 design patterns from years ago. Settings that I’m looking for aren’t always where I expect them – or sometimes they don’t exist at all. The mobile app is fairly buggy and I’ve had to put some work into figuring out an upload flow that doesn’t cause the app to crash midway through. But, for the moment, these are issues I’m willing to tolerate.
Also, in the style of Web 2.0 apps and in contrast to the walled gardens that dominate the web today, it has a robust developer API, so I have the option to write more tools for myself when I want them.
It’s possible I’ll find that Flickr is insufficiently maintained for my needs or I’ll find the time to set up a more exciting Indieweb or Fediverse alternative and expatriate my photos there, but for now I’m excited to have a place to share my photos again. Check out my photos on Flickr. I’ve uploaded a bunch of albums from my spring and summer touring and going to Pinewoods dance camps and I’ll be processing and adding more soon.
If you have a Flickr account yourself, follow me or let me know – I’m looking for more active people to follow!
This isn’t a hard line for me in general. I use plenty of Meta/Google products, including Instagram, but I like to find other options when I can and, especially since I expect to share a lot of photos of a lot of people who have a variety of feelings about sharing their likeness with the data-hungry monsters, I thought it was worth looking for alternatives here. ↩︎
Though I did set the privacy to only me for all of my older photos. Perhaps I’ll republish them someday, but for the moment it felt weird to have the historical version of me so prominently reflected by my photostream. ↩︎