I deleted nearly all of my photos from Flickr today. I will just use it for snapshots and family photos from this point forward. I can't really come up with a good rationale for keeping good images up there. When Flickr originally started it grew extremely fast and became the favored new way for sharing photos. It was unique and novel at the time, and showed some promise in terms of developing a community of users dedicated to digital photography in the new Web 2.0 world.
Then Yahoo bought them. They might as well have sent the app to Siberia. Just as when AOL bought MapQuest (and all new development ceased, only to watch as they were supplanted by Google Maps) all development ceased on Flickr, and Yahoo watched as Facebook and Twitter ate their lunch. The Flickr experience today is basically the same as it was 2 even 3 years ago. Why they would not want to introduce an ecommerce piece to their platform is anyone's guess. On Facebook you can create a page for your business and then grow a community of people interested in your work using social networking . Facebook is business -friendly, where Flickr is a place where amateurs can post their photos, and that's about it.
The only person I have seen who has been able to utilze Flickr to grow his business and presence online is David Hobby of Strobist fame. David uses Strobist to post photos that illustrate some of the issues he discusses in his blog posts, and has quite a following of active readers who post comments and critique their photos. That is an educational function that fits in with David's philosophy of creating an ecosystem to market his work. He is highly successful and in this sense Flickr is an essential piece of what he offers.
But for those of us marketing prints in a variety of formats it's a dead-end. They offer one style of Flash slideshow that hasn't changed since it was implemented. Users have to dig deep to get it activated. The user interface is awkward and difficult to administer. They allow visitors to "tag" your photos wth little boxes that reveal a comment when you mouseover them, thus creating a maintenance issue if users post comments that are not in tune with the message you are trying to convey. They offer a limited series of statistics that don't really give you much usable information. And there is no provision for any ecommerce whatsoever. If you want to sell your prints online you need another service, which means you just duplicate your uploads elsewhere.
The only advantage is perhaps an ability to become known via word of mouth, but I would bet that you need to become known first in other ways. Don't depend on Flickr to do that for you. As a result I see no real business case for using this service, even if it is free or has some additional features at a nominal fee. So, in the immortal words of Samuel Goldwyn, Flickr: "Include me out!".
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