[ Postcard from Caledonia ]

Here is one from the School of Incredibly Stupid Ideas - By now most fans of Flickr will have spotted that the site now supports the upload of 90 second video clips.  Woop de effing do.

In my mind Flickr is Digital Photography 2.0 - it has helped revolutionise the whole industry and given the photography market, and particularly the DSLR market, a huge boost. It wasn’t that long ago that (film) SLR had almost been completely removed from high street shelves as the joe public preferred 35mm compacts.

With the birth of digital one might have assumed that the trend for smaller form factors would continue - and it did for a while. However, once affordable digital SLR’s like the Canon Digital Rebel and the Nikon D50 came along, things changed as people started to see the huge difference in quality these DSLR’s offered over their compact cousins. Flickr helped that revolution by showcasing photographers and clearly showing what cameras they were shooting on.

Now I’ve already seen some videos appearing in my Contacts photostreams - I am guessing this might break the link I have on my Apple TV.

On the first 10 of the 500 “photos” on the daily explore page, 2 of them were videos.

If this had happened a couple of month after Microsoft completed their proposed acquisition of Yahoo, I wouldn’t have been surprised. To see that it has happened even before Microsucks got their paws on it just exemplifies the sorry state that Yahoo seem to have got themselves in.

My Gran used to say to “always stick to your knitting” - what she meant by that was stick to what you are good at. Flickr should have stuck to photography and leave video to the likes of YouTube et al.

I predict a huge backlash from the photography community here - I hope I am right and that Flickr has a re-think. Please.