Facebook killed Flickr for casual users by proving that the context and network around your photos is what matters. Nobody takes photos to put them onto Flickr in isolation, they want to share them (Facebook is the new "family gathers around the photo album").
Instagram has taken over on a newer vertical: it's Twitter for photos (driven by what's happening around me right now, off-hand).
That leaves Flickr to scrounge over the pro and prosumer photographers. Are there enough pro/prosumer level photographers to really make a compelling case for Flickr? Maybe. But probably not at the scale its founders hoped when they set it up. They had the opportunity to create a place for every digital photograph ever taken to go. They've instead been beaten out of areas they were leading.
If you want to backup your photos online there are better solutions. If you want to share photos with friends, there are better solutions. I'm guessing that there are probably technically superior solutions for pro/prosumers, too. I've been saying for a while that Flickr's cards are marked, I don't think Marissa Mayer will put any significant weight behind it and if I were a Yahoo! shareholder I wouldn't want her to.
Facebook killed Flickr for casual users by proving that the context and network around your photos is what matters. Nobody takes photos to put them onto Flickr in isolation, they want to share them (Facebook is the new "family gathers around the photo album").
Instagram has taken over on a newer vertical: it's Twitter for photos (driven by what's happening around me right now, off-hand).
That leaves Flickr to scrounge over the pro and prosumer photographers. Are there enough pro/prosumer level photographers to really make a compelling case for Flickr? Maybe. But probably not at the scale its founders hoped when they set it up. They had the opportunity to create a place for every digital photograph ever taken to go. They've instead been beaten out of areas they were leading.
If you want to backup your photos online there are better solutions. If you want to share photos with friends, there are better solutions. I'm guessing that there are probably technically superior solutions for pro/prosumers, too. I've been saying for a while that Flickr's cards are marked, I don't think Marissa Mayer will put any significant weight behind it and if I were a Yahoo! shareholder I wouldn't want her to.