I can hear you now, “Flickr is still around and you still use it?” It is and I do. And I like it.
For those of you who don’t know, Flickr is and old school social media site for photography. It came out way before Instagram and at the same time Facebook launched in February of 2004. Its popularity peaked in the early 2010s and declined afterwards, although it’s had a bit of a resurgence in the last couple of years.
I joined in 2009 and used it solely as a place to store high resolution photos online where I could group photos together in an album based on the type of photos they were like ‘fashion’, ‘beauty’, ‘portraits’, etc. and I could send people the link to check out my work.
I never used any of the social media features at all until the summer of 2023 when I rediscovered Flickr after getting bored with Instagram and IG changing it’s focus from photos to ads and reels. After years of neglect, I started to have some fun with Flickr. I added my photos to groups, favorited (Flickr’s version of liking) and commented on others’ photos all of which I never did before the summer of 2023.
The whole time I never really paid any attention or looked at Flickr’s Explore page, which is their page where the Flickr staff curates and posts the photos of the day. When I did look on Explore, it seemed like the majority of the photos selected as photos of the day were wildlife, landscapes, architecture with a few candid photos of real people – the kind of photos I don’t really take, so it was never something I ever looked at or thought about.
So it was a total surprise when my first photo got selected for Explore on August 9, 2025. It’s more toward the bottom of the page, you have to scroll down.
The one photo that I thought would NEVER get chosen for anything, let alone photo of the day on Flickr was my photo, “My Summer of Gout”. When it made it on Explore, I laughed out loud. As in, I really did laugh out loud. It wasn’t just an insincere emoji.
I took these selfies in the midst of excruciating and totally incapacitating and constant pain from a 2-month long gout attack in the summer of 2014. Some had the Summer of Love. I had the Summer of Gout.
I was in such pain and I wanted the photos to reflect that so I tried to make myself look as ugly as I could in the retouching. I’ve been told I succeeded.
The other surprise I got was when a second photo got chosen for Flickr’s Explore page on Christmas Eve day, December 24, 2025.
“Hollywood and Vine Bus Bench Encounters” was taken at the end of our “1950s Hollywood in 2025” photo series shoot. It was really an after thought to the main shoot but it’s one of my favorites from the day.