I’m Going Back to Flickr, Flickr, Flickr

I’m going back to Flickr (Man, I don’t…think so?)

Twitter is an open sewage pipe of hate. Facebook is full of Russian bots and fake news. No wonder we all pine for the days of the early internet…even the post- 9/11 version. Well, I discovered a site that is exactly that, it’s one I didn’t give up, and it’s something you may have heard of: Flickr.

I don’t know if anyone else thinks this, but Flickr is cool again. At least for me. I came back to it when I noticed that Instagram dropped a Flickr upload option. I guess their UPIs or whatever they call them stopped working, one of those under the hood changes that happens without anyone telling you. Like if you drove all the way to Palm Springs and didn’t get notification that, whoops, yeah, your car manufacturer had a disagreement with the coolant hose manufacturer and dropped all U-rings compliance, the ones connecting air to your face.

It turned out I had to rewire a IFTTT routine and then, boom, my Instagram uploads were once again going to Flickr.

But once on Flickr in order to confirm my upload, I began to wonder, why did I give this site up as an afterthought? And isn’t this what a lot of us have been looking for?

I mean, look at the benefits:

• User-controlled.
• Very easy to make albums and join groups.
• Exceedingly easy to navigate your past photos (esp. if you made albums)
• NO FUCKING ADS
• No social networking, although comments were always a part of Flickr
• NO FUCKING ADS
• You can completely ignore everybody on Flickr and just use the site as storage cataloguing.
• And…just in case you missed it: NO FUCKING ADS

I stopped using Flickr as much around 2013, when it was slow to join the smartphone revolution, and uploading pics from the iPhone *as it happened* was preferable to taking photos on my various cameras, uploading them to Abode Bridge, sorting, processing, using Bridge’s interface to upload to Flickr. I was getting overwhelmed.

But now, I’m rebooting everything (and trying to sort out this blog).

This is all part of an effort by me–but I’ve noticed others doing this too–to move back to a pre-streaming, pre-social media, pre-Facebook era. That means more blogging, more owning of my own material. Less monetizing. So we’ll see. You can’t put the horse back in the barn, but I don’t have to chase after the horse.