Yeah, I think people who want to show still photography are heading back to flickr for the most part. IG really only wants you to post video clips now, facebook is kind of a wasteland except for friends/family, no idea what is up with imgur these days, 500px is only bots. Flickr has a decent UI, not much spam, doesn’t look dumb, and you can host whatever you want at high resolution, and even get some minor amount of exposure.

Yes, Flickr is still useful and there are still good photographers using it. As someone else before me said, the film photography community is the best.

I miss the golden days of social sharing. I used to be super active on 500px. I can even say that my desire to be at the top improved my hobby. Once they aggressively started monetizing, the site lost its mojo—too many bots, mutual boosting, etc.

It’s great to hear that people are heading to Flickr. So many nostalgic memories. I will create an account today.

I find Flickr very useful when considering a lens or body. Using the search feature to filter by type narrows it down to what other people have shot. You get a good mix of art shots and snapshots.

I still use Flickr and even pay for it. I don’t use it to browse other people’s photos much, but I did join groups for all the different lenses I use/want to buy to help research. Flickr is also great for sharing pictures with family members - I turn on the download option and they can grab full size jpegs.

I haven’t used Flickr in a while, but I still get the occasional fave or even comment (that are not bots) on my older stuff.

Compared to my photography twitter account which sees nothing on my old posts, or my IG which sees next to nothing also, personally I’d say Flickr is still the most useful.

I still pay for Flickr - like others have said, it’s very easy to share with other people, especially people not on the platform. There’s also integration with Lightroom, which makes it incredibly simple to upload images. Stats are fun, despite the fact that I don’t really know how to use the information to increase my own visibility. I found out that a college professor uses one of my images on their coursework website, which was neat (I CC-license all my digital work).

Potential downsides - a while back, the site changed their policy on “visibility” to encourage more public-facing images, so I think there’s now a limit on how many images you can set to private or restricted viewing. (Maybe this has changed again, it doesn’t really affect me much so I lost track of where this is at.) I also find discoverability a little challenging, especially with regards to Groups; specifically, I want to be able to browse lots of Groups and I can’t figure out how to do that. The “community” stuff in general still seems to be lacking a bit, but maybe I’m using it wrong.

Reminds me of a comment from several years ago on a post about the future of flickr that i agreed with:

Slight off topic but a lot of people hate the site and welcome its demise but i still use flickr because i can’t find anything else that does what it does, it’s not perfect but it feels like a website made for photographers.

Sure other sites can do some of these but a list of things i like about it: -

• Albums & collections: very easy to create and organize, makes finding things later on much nicer, just wish more people used collections though.

• Tagging: Works very much like lightroom and can even pull LR tags automatically. The ability to search my own tags and narrow down by tags, flickr even adds its own ones and you can search by pre-dominant colour in a photo. I can go to a list of all my tags when trying to find all photos from a particular camera, film, place etc. very useful.

• EXIF: If photo has exif data it’s clearly displayed on the page and i can click through for extensive exif data as well. If a photo has GPS data in it there is a world map there and you can quickly drill down to where it was taken.

• Easily select various sized copies or the original, if made available, and the share button has various options for social media sites, email and bbcode for forums, very nice.

• Privacy settings are varied enough and useful, public/private/friends/family, change who is allowed to comment or add tags.

• Select what kind of copyright (or lack thereof) i want on photos, has 9 different options to quickly select from.

• Stats page for each photo with graphs and even where the viewers came from, there is also a summary stats page where i can see various things about all my photos. The Recent Activity page as well, lets me see if anyone has commented or favourited any photos so i can quickly respond.

• People page, you can see the most recent 5 photos from people you follow, makes it easy to keep up with their activity as not everyone is prolific.

While professionals will still be better off with their own personal websites on other hosts, flickr, for the most part, does feel like a site made for photographers, not social media snapshots and engagement farming, though they have tried to court that, it still at the core offers a feature set not available on other hosts that i am personally familiar with.

I love using Flickr when I’m looking at a new lens. It’s great to get an idea of what kind of framing I’ll be able to get from a particular lens. I haven’t posted in nearly a decade, but it is nice to use when I need it.

Thank you everyone for all these helpful answers! I’m reading through each one and I really appreciate them. It looks like Flickr is still good

For what you want to use it for, Flickr is still the best option!

I recently started to revive mine, and frankly should’ve used it for a link I posted this morning instead of 500px :P

Been a Flickr pro user since 2008, highly recommended as an image host. No bullshit, just does what it is supposed to do… serve your images.

try looking into adobe portfolio. you can set it up and upload bunch of pics/albums under in like 10 mins.

it can basically serve as archive and portfolio at the same time.

Glass seems to be pretty good so far

I got bitter and left around the smugmug time.

My photography priorities have changed a bit since then and I don’t really feel the need for Flickr or a site like it anymore.

Good for them if things are improving for them though! 😃