If you’ve read my early posts on this blog (from January this year), you may know that I used to love Flickr, and had uploaded 1000s of photos and enjoyed the online community of photographers from all walks of life. However, in October last year, the site’s owners – Yahoo! – started making changes with their “New Photo Experience“, which in reality actually made it worse. They were slow to act on user feedback, and slow to keep users up to date with the ongoing changes. Even today it has been over a month since an update to users on the site’s (hard to find) forum. They’ve made some recent upgrades to their mobile apps and blog, but users still get different Flickr experiences depending on their device, browser and language.
The mess Yahoo! made of Flickr drove me away in frustration, I tried the other major photo sharing site, 500px, but ended up going to SmugMug to make my own photo site.
Now I read on the 500px blog that they are making some major changes to their site too. It’s going to be interesting to see how the 500px site evolves, it certainly wont be too hard for them to do a better job than Yahoo! is doing with Flickr.
The war of the photo sharing web sites is heating up. I will be keeping an eye on both services, but will be concentrating on my own photo site, hosted by SmugMug, and blogging about my photography here on my photo blog.
This blog post was originally published on simonsphotoblog.com
at this URL simonsphotoblog.com/2014/05/flickr-v-500px