Did the Smartphone Kill Flickr?

Photographic nostalgia

I have fond memories of Flickr from around the time my most used social media site was Matt Biddulph’s Dopplr¹. I was fanatical about uploading and curating my best photographs, carefully tagging and manually geolocating each one. These of course being the days when only high end professional DSLR cameras even had the option of an onboard GPS.

But I stopped using Flickr in 2011, briefly going back in 2015—in the wake of Yahoo’s overhaul of the site—in an Om Malik like fit of nostalgia, and then never returned again.

Flickr was about photo curation, and the smartphone put an end to that.

My earliest pictures in Flickr were taken with dumb cameras, point and shoot cameras like the Fuji FinePix 1400 Zoom, the Kodak CX7430 Zoom, and the Samsung Digimax 201, and date from between 2002 and 2004.

However, around the middle of 2004 something happened. The resolution of the photos I was uploading to Flickr dropped. The reason was that I had now mostly switched to taking pictures with my smartphone². Or at least, what passed for a smartphone before the iPhone came along in 2007 and changed everything.

From 4 megapixels with my old Kodak point and shoot, to just 0.3 megapixels with the Nokia 3650, the quality of images I was taking…