I just renewed my Flickr Pro subscription and spotted that Flickr has introduced the ability to upload video.
In some quarters there has been uproar.
I was thinking about this. It doesn’t make sense in the grander scheme of video sharing (YouTube, Viddler etc.). I guess that was my first reaction, anyway. However, reading the FAQ and trying to understand what Flickr are going for here in the way that they have implemented it, I’m prepared to give it a try. The idea is described as “long photos” limited to 90 seconds, and it kind of works. I’ll have to watch and see how the site changes.
Yeah, i think it’s ok, it doesn’t really bother me too much, but I don’t think they work on the explore page, I’d rather they weren’t on there.
I think it’s great, competition is healthy. Just suppose flickr video takes off, resulting in a much better version of youtube! I also think the quality of video likely to be put up on flickr will be better than that of youtube, I don’t mean digital quality either, more that it is way less likely to contain all the tat you see on youtube.
I’m sceptical – I always thought the concentration on photography was what made flickr work. But they’ve been thinking about it for 4 years or so, and the warnings that it was coming were available, so the uproar is vaguely understandable, but pointless.
The majority of flickr users post snapshots to share with family/friends, and don’t use groups, and video is there to get these people to stump up for a pro membership. Then they can share the little video clips they make. At least that’s how it looks to me.
I’m coming around to the idea – I have some timelapse sequences lying around somewhere that would fit. I just wish they hadn’t demoted everything from “photos” to “items”, “things”, “bits”, and “stuff” depending upon which page you’re looking at. Seems a bit naff.
I have no problems with this. It is good that they allow it only for Pro users as this would stop a lot of YouTube idiots setting up an account and throwing up crap. There is no way to fully stop the crap (Have you seen some of the stuff the Flickr Team added?) but this is a good start.
Also, as Flickr is split into social groups, these groups will self monitor. I know the groups I am a member of will not become childish YouTubers overnight. I guess many of the other members of the groups would be interested in Policing the group too.
Let video come to Flickr.
Let us decide how to Police it in our groups.
Never allow video for NON-Pro accounts.
I don’t do much video anyway, so not sure how much I would use this, but it occurred to me that if people don’t like Flickr video then they don’t have to use it. My hope is that they make it easy to filter video in search, I use Flickr search often to find images for presentations and I don’t really want video in those results.
Personally I’ve liked what little I’ve used of Viddler for video, I wouldn’t mind keeping my photos and videos separate just because there’s already good video tools out there.
[…] to this? Well for starters, the only supported file format is JPG. That’s OK, but of course Flickr now supports video too, for instance. Oh, and by the way, this is going to upload all your photos, anytime you take […]