I’m a keen photographer, in the most amateurish of senses of course. I’ve done a few “pro” jobs and the best compliment I’ve ever received (possibly anywhere) was that I take photos like a Getty journalist.

I’ve used flickr as my “internet photostream” service for a few years. The last 3 of which has been as a pro user. I even kept my pro account this year despite my usage of the service diminishing considerably. My lack of usage is nothing to do with flickr or Yahoo, of course. It’s because it’s too easy for me to use my iPhone with instagram than carrying around a dSLR and spending time editing. As I said, I’m not a pro.

Flickr hasn’t innovated much in the time I’ve used it. Tweaks here and there have made it a bit better (lightboxing images to let us see them better, some extra community & sharing features, etc.) but it’s never revolutionary. The changes are never significant enough to make them evolutionary either, because the service doesn’t necessarily improve exponentially or respond to common critiques of the service.

Recently loud-mouthed Carol Bartz was fired from her position of Yahoo CEO. Yahoo being the parent company of flickr makes this interesting. Flickr is probably the only service me or anyone I know uses that is run by Yahoo, and Yahoo made a balls of it. Not only does flickr never change significantly enough to make it a better service, meaning it stagnated over the last while, it also integrates really badly into Yahoo. In order to be a flickr member you needed two logins to join – one for Yahoo, and one for flickr.

Flickr is also huge. It’s probably the largest photo-sharing service on the internet, yet Yahoo failed to capitalise on this market. It should have made photo sharing easier and nicer, kind of like a Vimeo for photos. It also should have integrated that huge community far sooner, and far better. Essentially, flickr should be a pro, clean and sleek version of deviantART – just without all the goth stuff being promoted.

There are, of course, alternatives. dART is lovely but impossible to use if you’re uploading more than one photo at a time, but the community integration is stunning. dART is to flickr what reddit is to digg. Both basically the same, but there’s a much more active possibility of people seeing and commenting on your work with dART. Much in the same way that reddit looks a bit nasty but your input is heard by the community.

Being Irish, anytime you go on a photowalk or talk to an Irish ‘tog, you inevitably have to have a pix.ie account. As nice as pix.ie is, it’s never really improved beyond the initial design. And the design isn’t nice. I realise it’s essentially one guy behind it, but about two years ago I said it should have a mobile version of the site if it’s going to release mobile pix.ie services. And it didn’t do that. If you can’t afford the time to do improvements, just push out an API and let developers solve your problems with third-party apps and services. Like instagram. There’s 4 people working on that, and instead of spending time on a web interface (taking time away from their primary goal, the app) they just spent some time pushing out an API. Now we’ve lots of web interfaces! It kind of feels like a lot of photographers in Ireland use pix.ie because it’s Irish, rather than because it’s the better choice.

Hopefully flickr can improve itself and move forward with the changes coming to Yahoo, but I get the distinct feeling that I won’t need to re-join the pro programme next year. The whole point of this post stems from the strangely odd feeling I got when I took flickr photos from my widgets list, simply because I’m not active enough with “real photography” to justify the space it takes up!