When Marissa Mayer took over as Yahoo's new CEO, she was instantly beset with widespread calls to save Flickr. Traffic was steadily declining year over year. The mobile app was an atrocity living in the basement of the iTunes store. It had fallen so far from its glory days as the web's premier photo service that many feared Yahoo might shut it down entirely. It would be a mercy killing, to be sure.
Few things have been more loved and neglected than Flickr. It's like the internet's own child of alcoholic parents. It was the web's first smash-hit photo-sharing site and a proto-social network that launched the same month as Facebook. Then Yahoo bought it and nearly destroyed it.
Thanks to bureaucracy and inaction, Flickr missed out on the mobile and social revolutions that have defined the last five years. Meanwhile, Instagram became the billion-dollar photo-sharing service and Facebook became, well, a company that could afford to buy a billion-dollar photo-sharing service. And as the world went mobile and every pocket carried a camera loaded with apps, we turned to Facebook and Instagram to share our photos of friends and family and food. Especially food. Flickr could have been Yahoo's Instagram, or maybe even Facebook. Instead, it became its Friendster -- a reminder of a bygone era and what could have been but never was.
But something funny happened. Our photography needs are growing ever more complex -- what do we do with all these high-resolution photos we've snapped? Yahoo has a new CEO. The competition stumbled. And largely thanks to a new app, Flickr is back; reborn, yanked up from the sea by its collar at the last possible moment. And in December, following its app roll-out, traffic went up instead of down for the first time in years. While it is too soon to say that Flickr is going to be bigger than Facebook or Instagram, there's a lot going on that indicates it's primed for a return.
Facebook is a continuing nightmare of privacy disasters. It's the bathroom door that resists all efforts at locking, swinging open again and again while you're trying to poop. When even Mark Zuckerberg's own sister (and also the company's former marketing director) can accidentally share photos in wider circulation than she intended, there are clear privacy issues that are yet to be worked out. And although Facebook's great for sharing snapshots with your friends, it's no so hot for pure storage.
Meanwhile, Instagram is knee-deep in its own problems. In December, it announced a new terms of service that made its users howl in protest, and was forced to roll them back after significant backlash. There's some evidence that caused a drop in usage. It has another issue as well, one that may not be important every time you take a photo, but the more photos you take, the more it grows: It's just not well suited to keeping pictures over the long haul. Upload a photo and Instagram automatically crops it into a square. There's no way to store the original resolution file to download later. You can't un-apply those filters. Want to go back and find an old picture you took? Too bad. Instagram is more or less useless when it comes to search.
Instagram and Facebook have another problem: Snapchat. Snapchat offers all the immediacy of Instagram or the Facebook News Feed, but none of their permanence. Much of Instagram's original appeal was that it was a quicker Flickr -- a rolling visual record of what your friends are doing right now. Facebook won fans by promising only your friends would see your pictures. But Snapchat is far faster than Instagram and far more private than Facebook. While Snapchat gets a bad rap for enabling sexting, it also is a legitimately cool way to share fleeting moments with just one person, right now, with relative assurance no on else will see it.
Which brings us back to Flickr. Flickr still doesn't have the speed or single-nature of Snapchat, but its current app does give it, at long last, Instagram's immediacy. And it has always had better privacy policies than Facebook. Here's what it gets right: If you're on the go, you can fire up the app and share timely snapshots in-app and on the move. You can mark them private, or limit the number of people who can see it to as few as one person. But it also stores full-resolution copies of your pictures, as many as you'd like. Go home. Log in to the website. Upload pictures from your DLSR -- all of them. Go ahead, the site gives you unlimited storage for $25 a year.
And that's the thing: Flickr feels like a permanent home. While sharing is great, it turns out that as we progress in our digital lives, as we take more and more photos and share them more and more places, we eventually want to go back and see them again. (Which explains the popularity of services like TimeHop.) We want to revisit them. We want to relive them.
And I think that gets at why the web was so adamant about Yahoo saving Flickr. It wasn't just that we wanted yet another app update. It's that we didn't want to give up on what we already had. In short, we wanted to go home again.
