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Most of you share your photographs now on Instagram or 500px. There used to be another site. It used to be “the place” when it came to sharing photos. This site was Flickr. Flickr is still around but most people don’t even know that it exists. Unfortunately, Flickr stopped evolving quickly enough to keep up with the internet and all these new sites and people moved on. I started using Flickr in 2007 and I’m still using it. It is a great place to share masses of photos and it is also great to share high resolution images so people can view it on a PC or their mobile devices. I pay for the Pro subscription which gives you unlimited storage of photos.
It works perfectly for me, especially as I can export all my images automatically from Lightroom and don’t have to do manual uploads like on Instagram.
A few years ago, Flickr was acquired by SmugMug, which is a big name in the photo industry. Flickr is here to stay and SmugMug supports this.
You should give Flickr a try too. Currently Flickr free accounts can upload a maximum of 1.000 items and there are a few other restrictions.
Unfortunately, Flickr is not perfect, and it would be nice if they would work faster on improving the service. That’s probably one of the reasons why it lost so much market share.
But luckily community members started developing browser add-ons and extensions to bring back useful functions which don’t work anymore or even expand the functionality of the website.
I will list plugins I use and can recommend below based on browser.
Chromium-based Browsers (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi…)
Below links will always link to the Google Chrome Webstore. You can install the same extensions also in Edge, Vivaldi, and other Chromium-based browsers. Edge has its own extension store, if you want you can just search that store for the same extension.
Mainly for Google Chrome
Firefox
User Scripts for Flickr
These are pieces of code to modify the behavior of a website. To use these user scripts, you need a script manager which is available for all major browsers. I use Violentmonkey, which is open source. Another famous user script manager is Tampermonkey, but this one is not open source. Tampermonkey on the other side is also available for the Opera Browser.
Tampermonkey Browser Extensions
Violentmonkey Browser Extensions
User Scripts
- Flickr Nag Remover: Removes the obnoxious “Upgrade to Flickr Pro to hide these ads” nag screen (that normally appears every 6 image slides) by deleting the ‘adCounter’ cookie that tracks your slideshow clicks. Only useful if you don’t have a Flickr Pro account.
Suggestions & Disclaimer
Are there any other extensions you use or useful Greasemonkey scripts? Let me know please in the comments. You are installing all of these extensions and scripts at your own risk. I am not responsible if anything happens to your computer, files, …
I have used the above browser extensions and user scripts for an exceptionally long time without any issue. One piece of advice I would like to give is to make sure if you install additional user scripts that these scripts come from a trustworthy source.
Peter is an award-winning photographer who travels all over the world to capture the beauty of our planet as well as the achievements of humanity. Follow Peter on his travel blog Gate to Adventures for more amazing places to go and explore.
