Graffiti bridge, by Marius Waldal on Flickr

A community this huge is difficult for members to handle. There are so many members and so many photos. How do you find photos you’re interested in, and members that share that interest? Flickr has some tools to compensate for this.

Current tools for finding your way on Flickr

One is Explore; a showcase of the 500 currently most interesting photos on Flickr. Explore gives you a window into Flickr, a way to see a selection of popular photos (I recommend flickriver if you want to view the explored photos).

Another is groups. Members are free to start their own groups, and decide what type of photos are welcome in the group. A group admin can remove photos that are inappropriate, or even establish a moderation layer so that photos must be approved by an admin to be displayed.

A common way to find photos, of course, is to search. You use tags to describe your photo, and people can search those tags. But, mind you, as the Flickr home page states when I write this: 160,129 things tagged with morning. So you might not get exactly what you’re looking for

An important part of the social aspect of Flickr is the comment section underneath every photo. This enables you to receive comments, insights and tips from other members.

All good? Sure, but things could be better. These are the 3 improvements I would like to see, which would make Flickr a photo sharing service that kicks, well, ass…

1. Discussion-capabilities in the comments section

For me and many others, the comments section is often used for two-way communication; not only for “critique-and-run” comments. If I leave well-considered thoughts on other members’ photos, I would like to see how they respond to this. Today, the only way to do this is to regularly check the “Recent activity” function. This, though, has obvious limitations. Mostly because if there are more than 10 comments after mine, a potential reply from the photographer can only be seen if I go to the photo-page again and scroll down to see if there is a comment from the photographer (hassle!).

Suggested solution: Flickr could add basic discussion capabilities to the comments section, allowing threaded comments. An obvious feature would then be to offer the opportunity to receive a Flickr mail if any of my comments are replied to. Or at least enhance the Recent activity view to display discussion threads that include me, regardless of how many other comments the photo have received after mine.

This functionality is a must-have! Social services is all about communication, and functionality that cultivates this one-on-one “open” communication is therefore important (bear in mind: not even the “Discussion”-section support threaded discussions!)

2. Functionality for limiting who can comment on a photo

Yes, I know that I can limit this to my friends and/or family, or any contact. This, however, is insufficient. Many Flickr users have tons of contacts. It is not uncommon that these users receive hundreds of comments on a photo. I must admit: when I look at a photo and have constructive critique I would like to offer, I usually bail out if there are already gazillion comments there (often with blinking GIFs, awards etc). How will the photographer notice my critique in the middle of all that “noise”?

While it is nice to see that others like your photo (“awesome”, “stunning”, “fantastic” etc), it doesn’t give you much in terms of learning what works and what doesn’t work in your photo. Because of this “superlative abundance”, some members create their own “private” groups where only select members are allowed to participate. However, this does nothing to limit the number of comments from a person’s other contacts on a photo.

Some may say that one can add the group members as “Friends”. That is not a good solution, as many use the “Friends” role for other purposes, and this may contradict that use.

Suggested solution: Flickr could add another permission layer: Only allow comments from other members of groups where this photo is added. If I add a photo to a specific group for well-considered critique, only other members of this group can comment. If I add it also to “the world through my eyes”-group, all the thousands of members there suddenly get permission to comment.

3. Twitter-like lists of contacts

People use the concept of contacts for several purposes on Flickr. Whatever the reason, you may end up having lots of contacts. This makes it near-impossible to follow all contacts’ uploads (which you probably don’t want to anyway). And it also makes it very difficult to keep an eye on your “closest” contacts; i.e. those you communicate most with.

For those of you using Twitter, you may recognize the challenge: How to stay up to date with those 20 most interesting people when you follow 1000? Twitter solved this elegantly with “lists”. A Twitter user can create a list called “Photography” and add only those they follow that are into photography and tend to tweet about it. And a list can be compiled for any area of interest. Today I might be interested in reading my photography list. Tomorrow it might be rock climbing.

Suggested solution: Flickr should implement a similar functionality that Twitter did. This way, I can choose to follow only my “strobist” contacts for a while, or those into black & white photography. Or those who are Photoshop wizards. Or whatever. I’m in control.

Do you have other suggestions? Do you agree on mine? Please have your say in the comments!

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