The Next Thing
Ever since the vast majority of users jumped from Flickr to Instagram, people have been complaining about Instagram’s lack of community, the tiny photo sizes, the lack of aspect ratios, and the dreaded algorithm; the latter especially became the target of their ire when many people didn’t see the amount of views they felt they deserved.
Several developers are now coming out with new photo apps that promise to fix the situation. And Flickr, it would seem, is their benchmark, with many promising an experience that rivals that of using Flickr back in the heady days when everyone was using it to find, show, and discuss photography online.
But they are addressing the wrong problem. First of all, Flickr is still around. You can still view good photography there at reasonable sizes. You can still join groups and talk about photography. People complain that the free version is insufficient and that you have to pay a small amount for all the usability, but then again, many of the newer apps coming out are also paid apps.
There is a salient reason why so many people abandoned a decidedly superior photo-viewing/community service in favor of a mobile app with tiny photos and very little community. The fact of the matter, despite all the engagement-farming claims in Threads posts like “I want to see everyone’s work, post it here!”, is this simple, unavoidable truth:
People seeking attention vastly outnumber people seeking photography.
This is not a recent phenomenon The number of people making and sharing photos skyrocketed when the technology made it cheap and easy to do, but their interest was mainly in using this state of affairs to garner attention. The number of people interested in making and finding compelling, authentic work, however, is a much flatter line. Instagram and the Like catered to the needs of attention-seeking users, and easily made images with strong geometric elements and colors that would stand out on a tiny screen soon dominated the genre, to the detriment of detail and subtlety. Once those users had decamped for Instagram, most everyone else followed because “everyone is on IG.”
So what are some of the current contenders for “the next Flickr”? Not that it matters much as they’re all falling into the same trap, but we might as well talk about some of the attempts:
First up is Glass. Glass is “a paid, global community platform for photographers. With no ads or manipulative algorithms, Glass is your home for photography.” So first off, it is, like Flickr, a paid app. To its credit, photos are viewable on large screens. Though it stresses “community”, I couldn’t find any discussion groups, but then again, I didn’t purchase the paid service. The viewing experience was pleasant enough, perhaps on par with that of Flickr, so I began uploading images. Before long, however, one was deleted, and I got a warning message. It turned out to be a street photo whose frame included a small boy pissing into a street grate. I appealed and received an even sterner warning from Glass’s head honcho that no such images would be tolerated and that my account was being threatened with deletion.
Ok, so that’s a no for me, and probably many others. What else?
There’s Foto, a much-talked-about app that is also subscription-based but promises a free version. It promises other things, too: “Reclaim your feed.” It exhorts. “Chronological, ad-free, and uncropped. Our goals are to let you see the posts of people you actually follow, to give you control of your experience within our app and reinforce that images are important and powerful.” Seems like a low bar. Also, Foto has been “coming soon” for some time now. Will it be desktop-based as well as mobile? Will there be groups? It’s difficult to see any actual improvements on Flickr at this theoretical juncture.
I was also told to consider Lyrak, which is all about users being able to make bag from their images. But when I asked if a desktop version would be available or if it was simply replicated the tiny-image problem of Instagram, I got no reply.
There are others, but it seems that, while most are concentrated on getting more viewers, more income, more Likes/Favs, and more attention, hardly anyone is talking about the work itself, i.e. finding and encouraging better photography, or actually discussing it. Unless that changes, it will be more of the same. That is, until AI reaches the point where personal photography isn’t taken over by phones as many have feared, but by instant, faultless keyword-driven image generators. No longer will anyone face the risk of a “bad” photo of themselves or anything else. Clients and customers will all be generally satisfied. Everything will look fine, every time, to an audience base trained to click Like on nicely arranged graphic elements. And nobody will have to do the work, go to places or take the risks of actually observing the world and making a photographic record of it. Indeed, Google is already vomiting up AI-generated travesties in searches for famous street photographers. At that point, we won’t be talking about which photo platform is best. We most likely won’t be talking at all.
So what can we do to improve the situation, assuming of course that enough people actually want to shift the focus from the attention economy to photography (which is a big-ass-umption)? We could of course sit on our laurels as Flickr has, confident that a sufficient number of people really love genuine photography and will do the Right Thing in the end.
Or, we could prioritize discussion and instruction that considers and elevates compelling, meaningful, emotive work over simple attention-gathering. Too many street photography “workshops” consist of leading groups of independently wealthy Western travelers with nothing but time and the latest high-end gear to “image-rich” (i.e. third-world) countries, where they are told where to stand and what to photograph in order to get those Instagram-friendly compositions. In fact, “Instagram spots” should be avoided rather than sought out, and Like/Viewer numbers should be relegated to a place below one’s own unique vision. Conversations should be shifted from the endless gear talk and rage-inducing hot takes in which we are currently drowning to what our images say about us and our ever-more-precarious connection to the world around us.
The problem with shifting the conversation back to meaningful photography is that such an enormous space has been created within the text-based attention-driven social media sphere that it now feels woefully insufficient to just allow the work speak its wordless messages into being without wrapping everything up in our desperate pleas for validation at any cost. But if photography is to have any kind of future, any reason to exist going forward, that is what we must allow it to do, with or without the latest app.
August 2024