Alternative to flickr
First, that move to merge ‘Old Skool’ with Yahoo. Bad as it was, what followed is even worse.
1) Limits on contacts. WTF? I mean to say, who the fuck is Flickr/Yahoo to tell me how many people I can call contacts? And then, the sugar coating. Make Flickr Better, with a TM. Serious case of paranoia, flickeroonies
2) Email notifications. I hate it, and fear that soon, they’ll insist only a Y! id will be used to send emails, and what’s more, you need to reply via comments only through Y! mail. (Yes, I know, extrapolating. But…)
3) Content filtering.
That’s how this stupidity begins.
One of the best things about Flickr is that our membership is made up of people from so many places and diverse backgrounds. It’s important to us that everyone feel comfortable, despite vastly different cultural and personal comfort levels. What I like, you might not, and it’s up to the entire community to make this work.
In other words, censorship.
Listen, flickr-oonies, I don’t want some staff tell me my photos are safe or not. How is one person the judge of what’s acceptable and what’s not? The flickr community is vastly capable of judging what it likes and what it does not, and needs no hand-holding from you. Seriously. If my photos offend some people, they will either tell me, or move to a stream they like.
What next? I can only post photos of cute babies in pink clothing next to a cat? Oh, wait, that may be pedophilia. And bestiality. And flickr doesn’t have that, right?
Besides, some parts of these worry me greatly. When I signed up, I didn’t see so many Don’t-s.—
Can somebody tell me if there’s a very close alternative to flickr? Zoomr doesn’t interest me much. I have loads of photos on flickr now, and quite a bit of time, effort and relationships invested in that place. Would be a pity to lose them all, but this Content filtering thing worries me.
RSS/XML
March 25th, 2007 at 11:26 am
What about google Picasa?
Photobucket is another option.
March 25th, 2007 at 11:28 am
A good option is Google Picasa web albums and Photobucket.
March 26th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
Not like flickr. But may serve the purpose and you may be already be aware of these sites
www.pbase.com
www.photosig.com
www.photo.net
www.aminus3.com
March 26th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Rich capitalists taking photos while poor laborers starve to death.
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:54 pm
[...] Apr 3rd, 2007 by charukesi On a forced break of sorts, I have been spending a lot of time going through photography sites and resources on the net. Flickr has been coming in for a lot of flak for going back to an autocratic 1.0 avtaar. And I found pbase… rather late, I confess, for someone so engrossed in finding and viewing great photographs on the net. [...]
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:55 pm
pbase definitely – see this
April 4th, 2007 at 8:13 am
[...] Apr 3rd, 2007 by charukesi On a forced break of sorts, I have been spending a lot of time going through photography sites and resources on the net. Flickr has been coming in for a lot of flak for going back to an autocratic 1.0 avtaar. And I found pbase… rather late, I confess, for someone so engrossed in finding and viewing great photographs on the net. [...]
April 7th, 2007 at 6:42 am
There’s also Stock Exchange (I refuse to use their stupid spelling), which is more oriented to photographers and designers.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Oh, shut up. Whiner.
Point #2 is bullshit. I receive my flickr comments in indiatimes just fine.
As for the rest… The fact that Flickr is still the most used photo sharing site says it all. Censorship is important after a while. I remember my younger brother accidentally stumbling onto a BDSM pic on Flickr that shocked him out of his skull. Now I don’t know how this is acceptable to you, but it sure as hell not acceptable to millions out there.
So yeah, leave Flickr. Go put your “safe” pictures in pBase or anywhere else and see how long they’ll tolerate it.
Besides, if your pictures are safe… what the hell is your problem? And if they aren’t, do the world a favor and quit flickr.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
[...] Ashok, replying to my post about an alternative to Flickr, says: Oh, shut up. Whiner. [...]
May 29th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
This is in response to Ashok’s strongly worded comment on the need for censorship.
The Wikipedia community’s average response time for undoing vandalization of popular pages is approximately 3 minutes. Time and time again, the internet proves that top-down censorship never works. Only a peer community/voting/report abuse based filtering mechanism works. Remember Digg?
The moot point is that it is impossible for an “editorial board” to draw a censorship line sensibly. An image of Ganesha wearing denim trousers is perhaps “objectionable” to a large group of people, but is “art” to another. How will the flickr editorial board decide which way to go?
Ok. Lets take a slightly more disturbing example, since you mention BDSM. I agree, its unacceptable to millions, but it is apparently acceptable to a few. Those fainthearted, please stop reading the rest of this comment. Lets imagine an hypothetical situation 5 years down the line – a certain tribe in Papua New Guinea has the age-old tradition of consuming human corpses (not live ones). Shocking and disturbing as it may seem to us, it is a way of life and it is in no way illegal in that part of the world. The disposal of human dead is a socio-cultural thing. People do it their own way – burn, bury, throw to vultures, or in this case, consume. Now, with access to technology, these tribals upload images of their funeral feasts onto flickr, which the “rest of the world” clearly finds objectionable. What will the flickr editorial board do?
My point is that, we cannot sanitize the web completely. There is just way too much diversity. I think every group will need to have their own “comfort-level” of censorhsip, if the internet is to remain the egalitarian force it promises to be. It would have made sense for flickr to adopt a more google like stance (moderate search, unfiltered search) etc and your younger brother could have simply used that option till he grows up. I just dont think top-down censorship will ever work in any meaningful way.
May 29th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Dear Ashok,
when your brother is freaked out after seeing something on the web, talk to him and explain that that is the way of the world and it takes all sorts to make this world.
If you go for censorship just because something freaks you out, you are no better than the marauding hordes of right-wingers who seek to ban everything they find offensive to their tastes.
Grow up.
June 25th, 2007 at 11:24 am
And of course, let us not forget that Yahoo’s actions directly led to the arrest and 10 year imprisonment of the Chinese journalist Shi Tao.
October 6th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Exactly, only the American-English don’t give a rat’s ass about a Chinese journalist, which is why they’re relentlessly using that photosite with the stupidest name ever invented. I mean really, “flickr”, it’s because of that name, and its sickening blinding white layout, that I don’t go there.
And pbase offers you 10 MegaBytes free space. Geez, you have got to be kidding me. Open any hosting account and you’ll get more storage space for 1% of their pricing, plus you have no censorship. I have my own Gallery at Servage, works just fine. The only missing part is the community-thing.
November 24th, 2007 at 3:47 am
I have been looking to an alternative for a while now; these responses here give me a start. Thanks.
January 10th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
I also have concerns about my thousands of photos on Flickr, and the great many contacts there who provide feedback and great photos pf their own – but not the same concerns as you:
I want to get off of Flickr because it is a Yahoo company, and Yahoo owns a controlling stake in Alibaba.com.
I am a shark photographer, and Alibaba.com is one of the biggest facilitators of sharkfin trading around the world. Long story short, YES, Yahoo is facilitating the ultimate demise of one of the world’s most important predators, so NO, I don’t want to give them any more money.
I’m up at Photo.net, but I’m still getting used to the interface; so far Flickr has the best means of interacting with others it seems…..
cheers
September 25th, 2008 at 8:24 am
This guy wrote a great review on flickr alternatives.
September 25th, 2008 at 8:25 am
http://www.photographybay.com/2007/12/03/flickr-alternatives/
November 14th, 2009 at 2:06 am
hi there, bluemelon is great – it even has an importer for flickr and other services, so you do not have to re-upload and re-tag or re-anything once you have done it there already