This is the second coming of Flickr, a rebirth, and I couldn't be more excited. I'm not a power user of Flickr but a fan of what it once was back in the day. It was a real shame to see it be neglected after the acquisition but Marissa Mayer has arisen as it's saviour and beyond that the saviour of Yahoo. For anyone of us it was blatantly obvious how powerful Flickr was and how it could have continued to dominate the photo sharing social scene. For some reason Marissa's many predecessors failed to see this. Honestly, if utilised in the right way, Flickr is a Facebook killer. At the core of Facebook is it's photo sharing service, take that away from them and it's nothing but useless news items from people you wish you could block.
I'm as quick to dismiss re-skinning as any self-righteous dev, but this really hit the spot for Flickr. Flickr has always had a trove of useful photo archiving and categorizing features...sometimes I upload photos just because their geocoding editor is so convenient to use. Many of the other major photo services lack even simple group creation of photos (I.e. having a single photo endpoint both be in your "Family memories" and "Summer Vcation" albums)...and Flickr is by far the best in terms of making it easy to discover old, but significant photos.
This is not to say that this means Flickr will survive against Facebook, anymore than quality point and shoot pocket cameras have a chance of revival in our camera phone era. But Flickr, for now, definitely has the edge in quality and variety of photos. Even if you think Instagram filters are the best thing ever, the laws of physics (I.e. optics) limits the vast majority of their photos to a narrow range limit.
It's worth pointing out that Google Plus has had a better photo album design than Flickr for awhile now...I just tried them out (again) and saw that they, for the most part, have most of what makes Flickr useful. However, Gplus is decidedly focused on social sharing...it's hard to describe how this drastically impacts its use as a photo service...but using GPlus's photo feature was, for the first time in a long while, that I've just given up in frustration in the first five minutes. But this may be just a sign that I've finally hit old age.
You make some valid points. I was not aware of the Google+ photo album design but then again I was only a user when it was mandatory within Google. I don't personally know anyone outside of Google who uses it. Quite a few public figures have accounts but none of my friends are on there. Google+ feels like a very closed community. I've never seen anyone share links to albums on there whereas someone is always passing around a Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Imgur or Dropbox url.
Flickr is almost 10 years old. They've been around longer than anyone right? It only makes sense that they would have one of the most mature products relevant to people who want to maintain thousands of photos and share them.
I think we'll see a lot more interesting features for Flickr over the next year as social and mobile becomes a bigger priority for Yahoo.
Oh I have nothing against G+ personally. I just don't use it and none of my friends do either. If there was a significant level of activity on there or better content discovery then perhaps I would use it.
Another awesome thing about Flickr is how good its API is. If you look around for web apps and mobile apps that do something interesting with photos, they're almost always built using Flickr's API, for good reason: it's likely the most open, easy-to-use, well-designed API for photos out there.
To be fair, I think of Facebook more as a good microblogging platform than photo sharing. Unless more has changed than I expected, Flickr will still suck for that.
Is it really though? I wouldn't necessarily classify it as a microblogging or photo sharing platform. It's a good old fashioned social networking service which revolve around the world of profile pages. Early on they introduced photo albums and it became huge for photo sharing with your friends.
At the end of the day Flickr is about one thing, photos, and it needs to stay that way. Yahoo bought Tumblr, an actual microblogging platform, that's their way into the big social game.
