[leviathant]

I still pay for Flickr Pro, for a couple of reasons: the API still works, and I basically use it as a DAM for my wife's website. She's a composer, and it's super handy to have her upload into a Flickr Album and pull back different image sizes for her catalog.

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.

[lou1306]

EXIF data enabled some pretty cool things, like PhotoSynth [1]. This stuff looks futuristic even now, ~20 years later, basically what the Metaverse could/should have been.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...

[leviathant]

I really enjoyed Photosynth. I remember coming across an account from a guy in Tehran, and there was something really moving about sitting in Pennsylvania and being able to explore his house ("Hang on, does that box say Barf?"), local parks, memorials, and other buildings, while thinking about how unlikely it was that I might ever see these things in person.

[hdjrudni]

Pretty sure we can fuse those photos together into a gaussian splat and roam around freely in 3D space now, rather than just have the rectangular photos pop up, but it's still very cool tech. I remember when that came out.

[sunaookami]

It's insane that a platform like Instagram that is focused on photo sharing compresses and downsizes photos so much.

[alex1138]

Because Zuckerberg. It's not the original platform anymore. You have to keep that in mind at ALL times with anything he buys

[amatecha]

Yeah the time capsule thing is a big part of its value to me. I will never forget how disappointed I was when the "Macintosh" group disappeared. I think at some point I actually chatted with someone who worked at Flickr and explained that the group owner simply closed it at some point (can't remember 100%). It had so many photos going back to basically the earliest days of Flickr, of all kinds of awesome photos of Mac computers of all eras, not only new digital photos but tons of stuff people posted from prior decades. The other Mac/Apple-related groups were not as comprehensive. That was good while it lasted, at least. I wish there was some way to re-open the group :\