So long, Flickr.

I deleted my Flickr account today.

It's taken a few months for me to come to that decision, but it's finally time. I've gotten a few requests for an explanation and I thought I'd put down my reasons here. Before starting, though, I'd like to say that, for a time, Flickr was the end-all-be-all of photo collecting/management for me. I've bought many gift Pro accounts for people over the years because I've been so happy with the service. It's just that in the last year, there have been a collection of reasons for me to abandon Flickr entirely and with my Pro account expiring there was no reason not to pull the trigger and put the account down. So, without further ado, here are the reasons I left Flickr today:

1. My primary use-case is gone. For the last year or two I've been using Flickr primarily as a backup solution for my photos. With hard drives getting bigger, iCloud, my iPhone, etc., I honestly don't need that sort of solution any longer.

2. It's not social (for me). Flickr's UI from a social standpoint is a travesty. Whereas other photo apps actively encourage viewing/interacting with my friends' photos, Flickr's seems to discourage it. The small affordance for recent activity (from both me and my friends) is painful. Not only that, but it's super easy for one friend to do a huge image dump and take over that entire unit. There's no sense of variety or thoughtfulness. This may be because most of my friends are using Flickr as an image-repo, just as I was.

3. Facebook's Timeline. My photos can be both social AND contextual to my life? With very little effort on my part? My god.

4. Instagram. Flickr should have come out with Instagram (or some V1 of it) as soon as Steve Jobs said they'd allow 3rd party apps onto the iPhone. It's hard to know if it was a lack of vision or some corporate bureaucratic mess that Yahoo created (I hear varying accounts), but this was a HUGE miss and one that I think, ultimately, will severely limit how high Flickr can go.

5. Retrieving your photos is nearly impossible. At least in any sort of reasonable order. First of all, even as a Pro user, there's no way to export my photos through any service provided by Flickr (seriously, that alone made me mad enough to quit). I had to download a few different third party apps, that basically all wanted to just grab the photos, ordered by title name (wtf), with no way to separate them into the groups and collections I'd spent so much time setting up. My solution was to export one group of photos at a time (with a third party app I paid extra for), reorder them by date in iPhoto, then upload them to Facebook. This took a few nights and constant monitoring. Did it get all the photos? Did the API poop itself mid-download? Ridiculous. I paid Flickr for years of service, never knowing that they intended to make it as hard as possible for me to move on if I was dissatisfied with their service.

To be clear: I don't think it's over for Flickr. They're still doing well, have a strong community and still provide a valuable solution for many people. It was the combination of the reasons above (some personal and specific to myself) that led me to delete my account and pursue a new model of curating and sharing my photos. I hope Flickr continues to grow and develop as a product (hopefully Yahoo wises up about what a gem/opportunity they have with the service). However, I will watch from the sidelines instead of being involved as a user.