The Flickr Explore page is still really amazing

Tim Carmody is guest hosting Kottke.org this week and asked for the best of the best, to produce a mixtape of the Internet. And here’s my vote for a small slice of what the best the Internet has to offer: The Flickr Explore Page.

Flickr represents one of the very best of things in the history of the internet. It was the first popular way to share photos in a social way instead of photos lingering in private accounts online and in the real world in shoeboxes under beds. It brought millions together and helped kick off first the digital SLR revolution, then it was eclipsed by the mobile photography revolution. Flickr—despite being a big corporate entity—embraced open licensing and took on the ambitious goal of being a mirror and gallery for oodles of museums around the globe.

Countless waves of social apps have eclipsed Flickr itself, and even though I don’t really post there much anymore or browse my friend lists (mostly because they’ve all gone inactive, like me), about once or twice a month I drop into the Flickr Explore page to gaze at what I would describe as an entire year’s worth of epic shots from National Geographic, generated each day, automatically by algorithms.

So yes, there are drawbacks. It’s a late-stage Yahoo property with an uncertain future. It was years late to the mobile/social app revolution and suffers to this day because of it. The Explore photos do tend to hit some common points: There are watermarks. There are overly-cooked HDR shots. It is mostly landscapes and macro photos. Yes, people are obsessed with reds and blues in the shots and they sometimes look unnatural.

But the upsides are many. Lots of wondrous shots from places I’ve never heard of. Lots of “how’d they even get that shot?!” photos of animals. Despite that I don’t use the site like I used to (and none of my friends do either), Flickr is a worldwide phenomena and still a place where very good photographers share their best works. And the Explore page changes every single day, replaced by another several dozen amazing new photos.

Another reason I love Flickr’s Explore page is that it lacks the commercialism of other spaces. Instagram has an explore tab but it’s popular music and tv stars and their dogs or it’s brand advertising-driven shots cooked up to sell something. There’s something so completely boring about Instagram’s explore page that makes me ignore it and go back to my friend feeds, whereas Flickr is the opposite: my friend feed is largely silent, but the best of the best page is truly awe-inspiring and at least one photo each day is going to take my breath away.

So yeah, Flickr Explore. Flickr’s still not dead yet.