On a psychoanalytical scale, it’s likely problematic to profess love to a web site. Eff that.
In yesterday’s early morning Mastodon scroll I saw a link to Anil Dash’s post that seemed to be, if you judged on title alone, an inquiry about NASA Artemis II photos.
I gave it the quick scan scroll, which spoke to wanting go read it in more detail. After the morning dog walk. By the time I had returned, my friend Gardner Campbell had emailed me asking, have you read this with the same said link.
I leave it as an exercise for the link clicker, if they do that anymore, to read it on their own. It’s a loving tribute to flickr which at 22 years old is earlly Cambrian era for a web site that is not oly still there, but still vital.
Even better is the link to the email interview conversation posted by Jessamyn West on the flickr blog (they have a real honest blog, reason enough for love) Anil Dash – using community to build power, for the rich observations, as well as a nice set of photos.
I had to add my flickr love to the pile.
Not to toot my own post horn, but I stand by the 20 love reasons from 2024 (noting many more I could add if I was that OCD).
Instead, I will link share something that encompasses many of these love reasons. See if you can guess the tag represented by 10 random flickr photos in my pechaflickr web site.
It’s not hard.
Or just play with pechaflickr on your own. The whole idea was to maskup pechakucha with those fun Powerpoint Karaoke things people did long ago at conferences. It’s a vehicle for improv. It got good mentions in the Twitter era, I am not sure anyone really uses it any more besides me.
First of all, I web duct taped this together in 2011 — and it still works (there might be a few PHP worms to fix). It’s made possible because of flickr’s public API, which, unlike almost every other Big Powerful Web Platform, has not broken, changed, or removed since it started. I have been told by someone who knows APIs that its maybe a gold standard. Pechaflickr makes use of the freeform, web 2 hippie style joy of folksonomy of tags, the old school style before that got all hashed to virality. I have a mode where you can draw just images from Flickr Commons… because I can.
And the whole mode where I can use it to make you guess a tag, came as a suggestion from a teacher in Alaska named Heather.
I am biased, and smitten, and others may have gripes with ther object of my affection, but I will say until the future grim day if the web blinks out… I love flickr.
Featured Image: Screenshot of search results for all my photos tagged flickr which works in 2026 as it always has done.
