Pogue's Posts: SmugMug Revamps Its Site, in a Challenge to Flickr

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Bits Blog: The New Flickr Is Pretty, but Is It Social?

screenshot via Flickr Flickr’s new site design creates a clean look and feel, but it is still missing a true social layer.

On Monday, just a few hours after Yahoo officially announced it had purchased Tumblr for $1.1 billion, the company unveiled a new version of Flickr, a photo-sharing Web site.

It sure is pretty, with lots of high-resolution, rectangular photos and a clean, grid design. The company is also offering everyone on the site a free terabyte of space to store their photos. That’s potentially enough to stores hundreds of thousands of photos.

But the new Flickr still feels like it’s missing one thing: social. Like its counterparts, including Facebook, Instagram and Google Plus, the new Flickr site has a familiar design: There is a banner across the top, which is a place to showcase a person’s favorite image. There is the classic square profile picture for each user off to the left.  To the right, a counter shows the number of photos someone has uploaded to the site and when they joined the service.

Where Flickr deviates from the rest of the social pack, however, is with the company’s choice not to show how many friends or followers a user has.

Yes, this might sound like a much-needed departure from the norm of ego-driven social Web sites, but how many people follow someone on a social site can do a lot for the users of the service.

First, for people browsing a social Web site like Flickr, a follower count can be a quick signal to help someone understand if a person is worth following. It’s almost a quantified look at the so-called wisdom of crowds.

There is, of course, the ego aspect of displaying such a number. A simple search on Twitter for ““more followers than”” shows tens of thousands of friends publicly prodding each other as they race to gain a larger following on the site.

On Instagram, there are more than 370,000 images tagged with hashtag #moreFollowers. There are also over three million pictures tagged with #100likes, where people desperately hope to pass 100 “hearts” on a photo they have taken. Although Flickr offers a “star” button to say someone likes a photo, its almost impossible to find on the site, especially for newcomers.

These numeric signals are more than just ego, they help create both a game dynamic and a reward system on these social sites — one that still seems to be missing from Flickr.

Last year, Yahoo unveiled a new Phone application, which begged the question: could Flickr, once the best photo-centric Web site on the Internet, regain that crown?

Its latest design seems to push it closer to that point. Now it just needs to show people how many new friends the site has made.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Making Money From Flickr Photos

Why do some photos on Flickr have a “Request to License” tag with a Getty Images link next to them?

Flickr has a partnership with Getty Images, a stock photography company that licenses digital images (as well as music and video) from its archive to publications and other businesses. When a Flickr photo has a “Request to License” tag on its page, it means that the person who took it has turned on the Request to License setting for Getty Images in his or her Flickr account settings.

If someone wants to buy the rights to use that photo, clicking the Request to License link sends a message to editors at Getty Images. Upon getting the request, a Getty editor checks out the photo and if it passes muster, offers to set up a licensing deal for a legal use of the image. It may take anywhere from two to seven days to set up a deal for permissions and pricing.

Getty Images charges different fees to license photos, usually based on the size needed. An extra-small 280-by-211-pixel photo may cost $5 to license, but a larger 2,100-by-1,400-pixel picture can cost $325 to use. The photographer still owns the copyright to the photo, but Getty Images handles the fee and permissions for someone else to use the image, then shares the payment with the photographer.

Getty Images also hosts a Flickr Collection on its own Web site that displays the work of Flickr members who have been invited to contribute. Photo editors, graphic designers and other people looking for images to license on the site can browse the Flickr Collection along with the company’s other image archives. Getty editors actively look for images based on certain needs as well and often post their own requests on Twitter.

Participation in the Getty Images program is not mandatory for Flickr members, and the preferences for joining in (or not) are in the Privacy & Permissions area of the Flickr account settings page. Dealing with contracts and legal agreements may be daunting at first, but Flickr has more information about the Getty Images program on its site. Getty Images has its own Frequently Asked Questions page for those interested in becoming official Getty contributors.