Insta or Flickr

Messages
38
Name
Phil Sage
Edit My Images
Yes
Good afternoon, what do ppl prefer for posting photos. Instagram or Flicker, any pro's or cons, better features and benefits ?
 
Both. Flickr is nowhere near as popular as it was but it's useful as an online archive of sorts, and for linking images into here. I don't keep mine anywhere near as up to date as I should, I tend to upload in big batches a few times a year. Instagram is much newer and much more relevant in 2019. You can't link to images to post here for example, but you will get a much, much wider audience for your work there.
 
I find despite the 'improvements' flickr is still a very good resource.
It's not just photo sharing it has loads of groups on sometimes very specific subjects. The homemade lens group for example has quite a bit of info that's difficult to find elsewhere...

When I 've looked at Instagram it seemed more for phone snaps (modified by aps to give pet features) than for photographers. My kids probably love it :rolleyes:
 
Its going through a few changes at the moment, ( read someone screwed up the "update") but it always was very good, and hopefully it will be again before too long.
The Current TP thread is HERE

When I 've looked at Instagram it seemed more for phone snaps
As I understand it, that is exactly what its for it seems you can only post from a phone.

modified by aps to give pet features
My mate joined the dating service, and wasn't sure whether to take the girl out for a meal, or down the park to play ball :D
 
When I 've looked at Instagram it seemed more for phone snaps (modified by aps to give pet features) than for photographers. My kids probably love it :rolleyes:


As I understand it, that is exactly what its for it seems you can only post from a phone.

A still common misconception of Instagram. Yes you can only post from your phone but it's very easy to get any image onto your smartphone to post. There is a lot of incredible photography on Instagram, and most of it isn't taken with people's phones. I can post from my laptop to Instagram via my phone in under a minute.

If you use Lightroom and have everything syned to Adobe's cloud then it's even easier as you can access your LR catalog directly from your phone.
 
Last edited:
I can post from my laptop to Instagram via my phone in under a minute.
Speaking as someone that rarely uses his phone for Internet purposes, that sounds like a lot of faff to me.
But I guess it works for some people (y)
 
Speaking as someone that rarely uses his phone for Internet purposes, that sounds like a lot of faff to me.
But I guess it works for some people (y)

As simple as exporting any file from Lightroom or whatever other image processing software you use.
 
As simple as exporting any file from Lightroom or whatever other image processing software you use.

I've just seen your edit ...
If you use Lightroom
I don't

and have everything syned to Adobe's cloud
Not a chance in hell ;) ( but of course that's another discussion that's been done to death ;) )

As above I'm sure it works for some, but its certainly not for me.
Camera > PC (CS5) > Flickr > and then where ever I decide it needs to be (y)
 
Flickr for me. I find flickr groups (at least those which are still regularly updated, and there's plenty) to be incredibly useful. Flickr is still very popular with a slightly older user base, and many of these users are true photographic wizards, and I learn a lot from them. The features for exploring photographic categories, and tagging/labelling my photos are simple to use and do the job. I enjoy flickr as a long time record of my 'best' photography - photos that I think I'd like to look at in the future and that I hope will reconnect me to a person, a place or a feeling related to my past. A log in which I try to capture my personal 'highlights in a journey', if you will.

I am not interested in followers, though I often engage with extremely nice fellas of flickr, and we discuss some aspect of some particular shot. I'm not interested in advertising my activity or my brand or a craft related to photography, or in competing for likes. If I were, I'd use Instagram. I'm sure there is some great photography on instagram, but I'd have to waste a lot of time finding it buried beneath HDR monstrosities, digital filters, oversharpening, oversaturation, and poor phone snaps.
 
A still common misconception of Instagram. Yes you can only post from your phone but it's very easy to get any image onto your smartphone to post. There is a lot of incredible photography on Instagram, and most of it isn't taken with people's phones. I can post from my laptop to Instagram via my phone in under a minute.

If you use Lightroom and have everything syned to Adobe's cloud then it's even easier as you can access your LR catalog directly from your phone.

If you've got a Mac you can post direct to Instagram using Safari. Develop/User Agent/ select Safari iOS iPhone. The browser will change so it looks like an iPhone and you can then upload to instagram. I guess there might be work arounds for PC's too.
 
I am not interested in followers, though I often engage with extremely nice fellas of flickr, and we discuss some aspect of some particular shot. I'm not interested in advertising my activity or my brand or a craft related to photography, or in competing for likes. If I were, I'd use Instagram. I'm sure there is some great photography on instagram, but I'd have to waste a lot of time finding it buried beneath HDR monstrosities, digital filters, oversharpening, oversaturation, and poor phone snaps.

Instagram is in many ways the same as Flickr, you just need to spend a minute or two learning how to navigate around it. And lets face it there's plenty of HDR monstrosities, digital filters, oversharpening, oversaturation, and poor phone snaps on Flickr too.
 
Instagram is in many ways the same as Flickr, you just need to spend a minute or two learning how to navigate around it. And lets face it there's plenty of HDR monstrosities, digital filters, oversharpening, oversaturation, and poor phone snaps on Flickr too.

But not if you join well-moderated groups, of which there are still many.
 
Why did't Instagram just make it so you can upload from a PC? Not to seems a bit stupid.
My best guess is that its instant so all these selfies and dog like images are on the Internet, as soon as they are taken,
.... instantly.

Its all about the I want it now culture ;)
 
Last edited:
If you've got a Mac you can post direct to Instagram using Safari. Develop/User Agent/ select Safari iOS iPhone. The browser will change so it looks like an iPhone and you can then upload to instagram. I guess there might be work arounds for PC's too.
Here is a link to a YouTube vid on how to upload from a PC to Instagram

View: https://youtu.be/EGhsqggsSyU


I use both Flickr and Instagram. I use Flickr mainly as a means of sharing / linking my pics.
 
Why did't Instagram just make it so you can upload from a PC?
Instagram is owned by Facebook and I suspect it's all about tracking. Things like ad-blockers are far less common on phones and people can easily remove exif and location data from camera photos, in fact they may not have that data in the first place. From your phone facebook can link your Instagram account to your facbook account and use it to feed into targetted advertising.

But then I might just be over thinking it and yes I have both facebook and Insta. I see very different facebook stuff on my ad-blocked/tracking-blocked PC than I do on my phone :)

The other thing is flickr allows for viewing large.
 
Instagram is owned by Facebook and I suspect it's all about tracking.
Every day is a school day.
Of course I should have guessed and it all makes sense now ;)
 
Both. I've used Flickr for probably 10 years or so back when I was crap...... ;)

Use that for groups, to host on forums etc Can then easily save from there, add crops, etc in Snapseed to get them in a nice format for uploading to Instagram as a set.
 
Instagram at present. You get a lot more interaction but I hope Flickr gets popular again, there's still great photographers on it and it's nice to view larger images.
 
Why did't Instagram just make it so you can upload from a PC? Not to seems a bit stupid. The faffing maybe easy but it's still faffing

That is annoying, but as others have said there's ways around it - I use the Bluestacks VM app for Windows
 
A still common misconception of Instagram. Yes you can only post from your phone but it's very easy to get any image onto your smartphone to post. There is a lot of incredible photography on Instagram, and most of it isn't taken with people's phones. I can post from my laptop to Instagram via my phone in under a minute.

I tend to upload albums to facebook from my PC, and then share the ones I want from there to Instagram to save me the hassle of copying them to my phone.
 
I tend to upload albums to facebook from my PC, and then share the ones I want from there to Instagram to save me the hassle of copying them to my phone.

It depends how soon after the event I want to post to Instagram. If I want to post a shot straight from LR while I'm still going through the images I have an Instagram export preset that exports to a folder synced with Google Drive, thus getting the photo onto my phone to post on Instagram. Once I've finished processing then the LR collection will be synced to the cloud anyway so I can grab images from there for posting.
 
I've used Flickr for a few years but recently started using Instagram as well, so at the moment I upload to Flickr and then download to my phone from the flickr app to upload to Instagram.
Another thing I've found and I'm not sure if this is a good thing or unimportant in any way, but I quite like the speed of editing images on my phone rather than being a bit more obsessive when editing with Lightroom on a 27" monitor. The image quality does suffer as a result (and so do my eyes) but as the images are displayed on a smaller screen, it's not as noticeable that the images are of significantly poorer quality.
 
Recently, Flickr groups seem to have become very quiet conversationally. I don't know if it is because of the slow and erratic behavior the site has been exhibiting lately or the new 'conduct' guidelines that SmugMug has instituted. For those who are unaware of these guidelines you can find them by going to the bottom of any page and look for the 'guidelines' heading; they can be read there. When I recently opened my current account I was not asked to agree to these guidelines. So, I presume they are quite new. For a social networking site that Flickr is I find it surprising that these guidelines now 'limit' social interaction by limiting comments and faves. The basic social interaction on Instagram seems to be - if you 'like' me I will 'like' you. That has no attraction for me. Consequently, this is why I've come here. To listen in to conversations and occasionally offer my two cents. Thus far it has been a nice experience being here.
 
Flickr is going down the hill but seriously Zuckerberg's instagram is so damn awful and underpowered and intentionally crippled (mobile only, crappy search, etc) I fail to see how anyone could find it attractive.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 4wd
Flickr is going down the hill but seriously Zuckerberg's instagram is so damn awful and underpowered and intentionally crippled (mobile only, crappy search, etc) I fail to see how anyone could find it attractive.

It's attractive because of it's user base. Yeah, it's crappy, but it's the only game around sadly.
Flickr has been dying a slow death for a while now and Smugmug don't seem to be doing anything to reverse that (quite the opposite in fact)
 
For me it feels like Instagram is currently my better option rather than Flickr. I loved flickr once but times move on and sadly Flickr didn’t. Posting via a phone isn’t an issue if you can export a copy straight from lightroom mobile to post to Instagram. I can use the same method to post to Flickr too.

Currently Instagram does everything I need. I can post up an image and decide to post it to my Facebook page and/or Twitter at the same time if I want to (they post better to Facebook than twitter-Twitter uses a link back to Instagram). I did work out a way to do the same with Flickr through zappier but that’s recently stopped working. For me that’s a big thing as it helps to manage the three platforms more easily. One thing I notice with instagram is that you see less near identical photos posted. On flickr some would post huge amounts of similar photos taken millions seconds apart.
 
Last edited:
Flickr for me every time , my stuff is stored in chronological order with all exit data intact . It’s easy to use ,supports images as big as I wish to post ....
Yeah there’s also instagram,what’s app, plus others and not forgetting tons of groups on faceberk .. which is where the main problem lies . I put one pic on Flickr and can add it to 60 groups as one upload ,if I put it on faceoff I hav3 to manually add it to lots of different groups and if friends have done the same I see the same image several times over it’s a bloody shambles
 
Flickr for me every time , my stuff is stored in chronological order with all exit data intact . It’s easy to use ,supports images as big as I wish to post ....
Yeah there’s also instagram,what’s app, plus others and not forgetting tons of groups on faceberk .. which is where the main problem lies . I put one pic on Flickr and can add it to 60 groups as one upload ,if I put it on faceoff I hav3 to manually add it to lots of different groups and if friends have done the same I see the same image several times over it’s a bloody shambles

Same for me, cannot stand IG as a platform, it's barely better than viewing large thumbnails, it seems much more abut trend than talent too. I like to upload my images full res, I like that people can pixel peep if they wish, and see all of my settings. On IG I feel you may as well use a crappy phone cam because it seems every other image posted on there has a terrible filter smacked over it and the block of hashtags for attention are often larger than the image itself!
 
It's attractive because of it's user base. Yeah, it's crappy, but it's the only game around sadly.

I get it but in a way that sounded almost like gulags were attractive because so many people were put in them, or that somehow STDs are attractive! :)
If it is so bad and it is people should just move on. Just posting an image from dSLR is near impossible, and then you can't have a working weblink!
 
I use flickr as a storage and organising facility.

works for me.

Can't be done with all those "social" media sites.

If you want to be part of the "social" environment then I guess other sites are available.
 
I get it but in a way that sounded almost like gulags were attractive because so many people were put in them, or that somehow STDs are attractive! :)
If it is so bad and it is people should just move on. Just posting an image from dSLR is near impossible, and then you can't have a working weblink!

Generally the idea is to use Instagram as a window to your own website
 
Generally the idea is to use Instagram as a window to your own website

That's precisely what I would want to do except no links allowed. Nobody bothers with generic link in bio, they'd never find image burried 3-4 levels deep
 
It’s pretty easy to get to the bio and their website link. It’s not exactly hidden, just click on their instagram name and it comes up in the text.

Yes, but instead of the image for sale they find generic home page, even if they bother to go that far, and almost certainly don't find that image in a catalog of 30,000... = Sale lost
 
Yeah, (Flickr)'s crappy ... has been dying a slow death ..
I wouldn't call it crappy and I'm not sure what you're referring to there, but it's good for what it is as an image exchange mechanism (especially when free!). There is certainly a huge amount of crap on there, but I don't look for it so I hardly see any - you can choose what you see to a large extent. And there are gifted photographers from all around the world that you can track down and pay attention to (or not!).

The posted content in groups tends to be pretty dire overall in photographic terms, but that's a defect of lazy moderation (curation) by whoever started / oversees the group in question, not Flickr's fault.

To me it's a fairly functional medium for image exchange. It is (so far) a less corporate environment, or less aggressively so, than various other places.

It's not the best place to present your portfolio, granted, since there's little control over display parameters and layout. But you'd have your own website for that, wouldn't you.
 
Yes, but instead of the image for sale they find generic home page, even if they bother to go that far, and almost certainly don't find that image in a catalog of 30,000... = Sale lost
I guess it doesn’t do that specific direct link thing. Instagram like Facebook is more to build a following and hopefully direct that following to your website. That’s social media for you.

Is Flickr used in that way? I always thought there was a T&C that prevented linking to professional selling (Unless things have changed since smugmug took over).
 
Back
Top