Twenty years ago today I posted my first photo to Flickr.
I'd been to Lewisham for the day as part of my Random Borough project and thought you deserved to see 13 of the better pictures in greater-than-microscopic size. For my inaugural upload I picked the ever-photogenic Laban Centre on Deptford Creek in cobalt sunshine, and invited you to take a peek.
(more tomorrow - in the meantime you might enjoy my new Flickr photostream with more shots of gorgeous Lewisham)
This was long enough ago that fewer than ten million photos had been uploaded to Flickr - my Laban shot has a seven-digit ID number. By contrast my latest photos are eleven-digiters, confirming an explosion of digital imagery over the last two decades. Sticking photos online was relatively new back in 2005, hindered by retro-mobile technology and substandard transfer speeds. Today we think nothing of uploading photos and videos for immediate consumption, so much so that the visual has overtaken the written in our digital communication.
April 9th 2005 wasn't the day I joined Flickr - for some reason I'd signed up over a year previously. They were a cute fortnight-old start-up at the time, complete with an occasional inability to spell.
Welcome to Flickr, diamond geezer!
You can use Flickr to:
• Chat and exchange photos live with your friends
• Meet people who have the same interests as you
• Stay in touch with your friends and family
• Have fun
When you invite people to join Flickr you are instantly connected to them. Join a group by browsing through the public groups people have already started. Or if you want to have a special group for just you and your friends, create a private group. To benefit the most from Flickr, add more details to your profile about your interests, add a buddy icon and add photos to your gallery.
We look forward to seeing you in Flickr!
The Flickr Team
Please note: ln the initial weeks of the beta period reliability may be sporadic while we optimize the system and new servers. Outage start times and anticipated lengths wiltbe posted to the news page with as much notice as possible. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience thls may cause.
What's most amazing about Flickr is that it's still going. Twenty years is forever online, plenty long enough for your premise to collapse or for the big company who bought you to let you wither and then pull the plug. In this case Yahoo proved poor masters and eventually got rid, which would have meant oblivion had not a smaller company called SmugMug stepped in. Thus the site is still here, thank God, and so are hundreds of millions of images representing a phenomenal social record.
Since posting my first photo it's been viewed by almost 2000 people (1944 to be precise, a number I suspect will have increased somewhat by the end of today). Almost six thousand have looked at the next one, a Tellytubbyesque landscape from the front of the same building, a total high enough to place it in my Top 200 Most Viewed Flickr photos of all time. Alas this is an increasingly meaningless ranking after a fortnight of statistical blips in October 2022 gifted entirelyrandomphotos massive viewing totals. But if I strip out those annoying interlopers these are my Flickr Top Five, my photo-sharing greatest hits.
1)Entrance to nudist beach, Telscombe Cliffs (44,296 views): It's the phrase 'nudist beach' that keeps punters coming back, alas missing the key word 'entrance' (because there's nothing to see here). 2)Met No 1 (26,343 views): In 2013 a 'Learning English' website used my photo of a steam train at Farringdon to illustrate a podcast, and attributed it properly, which has brought a steady stream of visitors ever since. 3)Fatboys Diner (20,527 views): This Fifties trailer alas no longer serves burgers at Trinity Buoy Wharf but my wonky 2008 photo still has traction. I saw its empty silver shell recently from a train, awaiting rebirth. 4)American Embassy, Nine Elms (19,731 views): Very occasionally one of my photos is embraced by Explore, Flickr's global daily Top 500 feature, which loved this photo of Nine Elms' defensive cube. It's rather easier to get into Explore now than it used to be. 5)Shivering Sands sea forts (18,145 views): I got lucky with a level horizon on a rocking boat off Herne Bay, garnering multiple Flickr favourites and a long shelf life as a "go-to" photo for this rusting offshore marvel.
At the other end of the scale, my least viewed photos are a sequence of inconsequential shots from Outer London of minimal interest. Even so, only eleven photos in my online portfolio have had fewer than 200 views over the years, which if you're on Flickr yourself you'll know is a phenomenal strike rate. They're all from a particularly dull set I uploaded in 2006 so it serves me right. Of the dozen other photos that never mustered 300 views, what barely interested anyone are a trip to Rome, a Paralympic tennis match and a week in San Francisco, which I've never quite understood.
I suspect photos of my recent trip to Dover would be in these doldrums had I actually managed to upload them, but I haven't yet which is annoying - an anniversary opportunity lost.
I also combine my photos into Flickr albums where appropriate, especially if I go to a far-flung place and want to make it easy to showcase my visit. Here are my five most-viewed albums ever, and perhaps you can see why they are.
1)Olympic Stadium site (10,406 views): I stood on the same bridge over Marshgate Lane and took a monthly photo of the Olympic Stadium arising, so this is a unique record of inexorable change and rightly my most-viewed album. 2)Metroland Revisited (9,324 views): For John Betjeman's centenary I followed in his documentary footsteps up the Metropolitan line, and it was 2006 so photo quality wasn't great but nostalgia won out. 3)Fleet River (NE branch) (9,255 views): My month-long bloggery down the River Fleet was much shared at the time and brought diamond geezer to a wider audience. I compiled five albums of Fleet photographs, geographically focused, and if I extended this list to a Top 10 the other albums would be 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th. 4)Inside the Gherkin (9,164 views): For Open House 2006 I queued for hours to see London from the top of the Gherkin, and thousands of people have subsequently wanted to know what that view looked like. 5)My Most Interesting Photos (8,481 views): Flickr's algorithm nebulously combines views, comments and favourites to create a ranking by 'Interestingness', which for years had the Maunsell Forts at the top of the list. This album alas no longer automatically updates, otherwise it'd show that my Most Interesting photo is now of icy boats at Richmond Bridge.
Being on Flickr has brought unexpected opportunities and connections. A few authors have messaged saying "could I put this photo in my book?", which I often say yes to. They've also ended up in doctoral theses, walking leaflets, BBC revision materials, first day cover envelopes and on an information board beside the River Chess at Sarratt Bottom. Most notably the actual Bob Dylan exhibited a painting based on my photograph of Blackpool Pier, which blew my mind and was deemed worthy of a half-page spread in the Daily Telegraph. More recently an old photo from the Millennium Dome helped a visiting Algerian find his father's poem on the Greenwich Meridian, which he'd never have known about had Flickr not existed.
Flickr's longevity has also helped preserve hundreds of photos I'd otherwisehavelost when my hard drive died in 2006. But the potential danger works both ways. I've invested hours of my time curating an online portfolio, currently 18852 photos in total, complete with captions, tags and geographical locations. But there's no guarantee whatsoever that Flickr will maintain functionality in the future, or indeed continue to function at all, so all that effort may one day be wiped out.
I've also invested a heck of a lot time in embedding Flickr into this blog. When I've visited somewhere interesting a lot of the links in the next day's post are often to Flickr photos to illustrate what I've seen, indeed there must be tens of thousands of such links by now. But twenty years of backlinks could so easily be rendered obsolete by some as-yet unforeseen upgrade or recode, peppering thousands of my posts with instantly dead links. If Flickr over-improves itself, or fails completely, my blog will be rendered annoyingly incomplete.
It seems unlikely that Flickr can survive another decade without something going wrong, be that degeneration of functionality or withdrawal of service. But I said exactly that in 2015, and yet here it is still going strong. I hope you enjoy looking at the photos I stick on there, be that for artistic, geographical or purely inquisitive reasons. And I hope they'll still be there to look at in 2035, even if the things I've taken photographs of are by then long gone.
