I’m Making a Bold Statement: Flickr is Better.
I know, I know.
Flickr instantly lost its cool-factor back in 2009 when it was bought by Yahoo. And I admit, the whole website pretty much hasn’t done a thing, other than integrated with Yahoo accounts, since that time.
Nowadays the hot photo website is Imgur. It’s the perpetual sidekick of Reddit, the biggest thing going on in the internet these days.
Believe it or not, most of the new stories, viral videos and funny pictures that you see on major publications all start out on Reddit. It’s the kind of wellspring of pop culture at the moment. It started out as cat pictures. And granted, it’s still FULL of cat pictures. But it has relevancy right now. Even celebrities have made it part of their movie promotion tour to do an interview on Reddit. It’s that big.
Flickr, meanwhile, has languished as a place where amateur photographers place their photos…for almost no one to see. There’s no sizzle with Flickr. Post the same pictures on Imgur, and then upload them to Reddit, and suddenly you can build a whole fan community of like-minded people who really dig your work.
But here’s the kicker: Imgur is only an image hosting website built to serve the whims of Reddit.
Flickr, in principle, is better. Most of Reddit bans the use of Flickr images, which is a bit unfair. But the images themselves are much higher quality. You can organize them into galleries easier, you can choose how HQ you want your images to be. And you can provide unlimited descriptions to help people learn more about the pictures (and you as well).
Flickr is socially integrated, it’s just integrated with the wrong network. Once people could only log in with their Yahoo accounts, I imagine that millions of users either didn’t bother, or created their accounts and then promptly forgot their passwords (it happens to me all the time).