Flickr Not Dead, But Losing The Soul Of Photo Sharing

The buzz in photography circles this past weekend was a post by Thomas Hawk declaring “Flickr is Dead.” It’s not the first time we’ve heard this attention-grabbing headline. By the numbers, it’s hard to call a photo sharing site with more than 5 billion photos “dead” just yet, and Hawk admits it will take time. But, Yahoo-owned Flickr is facing increasing competition and influential photographers are choosing to upload elsewhere.

Hawk, who was an early Flickr evangelist, first asks readers to compare his Flickr page, with its “same view since 2004″ to his infinite scrolling Google+ photo page. But his real moment of realization came last week. Trey Ratcliff, an expert in HDR photos who also runs a popular travel photo blog called “Stuck In Customs“, led a photowalk at Stanford that more than 200 photographers of all skill levels attended. They are still trying to confirm this, but it might have been a “World Record” photowalk turnout.

Hawk writes “What was everybody talking about at the photowalk? Flickr? No. Google+? Yes. Not only was everyone talking about Google, there were tons of people from Google who were there.” The list of Googlers included the Google Photos Community Manager and the guy who build their lightbox.
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