“I’ve seen some of the weird porn stuff pop up from time to time, but I’ve never really interacted with it,” says photographer and magazine editor Stan Horaczek. With this in mind, most photographers rarely interact with the community anymore, but some are aware of its more carnal side. There was and still is no algorithm the way that Facebook and Instagram have. This got your photos more exposure as the main news feed showed activity from your groups, your friends, and the Flickr community at large. Then you’d submit and share your photos to various groups. After a shoot, it was common to edit, create an album, write a description, and upload the images with specific keywords–the predecessor to hashtags. In its heyday, it was primarily a community for photographers to hang out and talk art/gear/shop in addition to showcasing their photos. We’ve found that most working professional photographers and hobbyists probably don’t use Flickr actively. Perhaps the lack of knowledge of these communities within Flickr is one reason for that. Somehow or another, Flickr avoided the same fate. But Yahoo! also bought Tumblr and tried to clean it up of all NSFW content. Mayer made about photographers perhaps didn’t make things any better.

When Marissa Mayer bought Flickr on behalf of Yahoo!, it didn’t seem like she got the help she needed to transform it. Much has changed on the web since then, but a lot of Flickr has stayed the same. Where Instagram courted the most recent generation of photographers, Flickr captured the hearts of those who remember the early days of broadband. If they do, then they’re probably over the age of 35. Ask most photographers in your friend circle or network, and you’ll find that most don’t use Flickr anymore. Most people probably aren’t aware of Flickr’s more wild side. Depending on how liberal-minded you are, nudity and pornography aren’t the same things. Ip’s point, 500px was always known for its affinity for nudes produced by Russian photographers. The rest of the staff agreed and never knew about the porn community on Flickr. “Always thought that was more of a 500px thing,” said Phoblographer’s Reviews Editor Paul Ip in our staff Facebook chat. Tumblr had the hammer brought down on them for NSFW content, but Flickr avoided this somehow.

Flickr pics