Disincentives and Photo Hosting

I’ve been searching for a simple, scriptable photo hosting tool so that I can move off Flickr, and I’ve found one. Photo hosting tools don’t seem to have evolved much in recent times, which is unsurprising given social media does the job of photo sharing for most people. There are a few tools, for sure, but there’s something fun about hosting my own photos so I can optimise, meddle and learn and still have the joy of sharing (and indeed sharing without ads).

So it’s time for me to say goodbye to Flickr. It’s been a good technical platform and seems to have a community in it, but I didn’t like Flickr’s injection of ads in my galleries and the platform does feel irreversibly stagnated - I was excited while when Yahoo gave it some focus a few years back, but there’s nothing to indicate anyone’s committed to developing it.

So I’ve moved my photos across to a self-hosted instance of Sigal. Performing the move was a delightful task as I relived some of the memories that I’ve previously published, and then discovered albums that I could have published, but never did. I realised my reservations about Flickr were a subconscious disincentive for publishing.

So, with this renewed vigour, I’ve published photos from my 2016 trip to Cyprus along with the rest of my photos. I hope you enjoy them.