imran*

Here’s my first Flickr video – from a visit to Boston in 2002 🙂

There’s been a lotta whining and grousing about the launch of video for Flickr Pro users today, with criticism largely polarising around the 90-second limit or elitist fears of a YouTube-style pollution of the pristine Flickr community. I  these concerns will be largely unfounded…

• I suspect most users will be recording video ‘before and after’ a photo is taken. Perhaps such a contextualising video to accompanying a Flickr photo will be seen in time as no different than geotagging an image…it’s just extra contexty 🙂

• Brevity in video is maybe not a bad thing. 140 character limits on Twitter have only enhanced the creativity of that community…

• Flickr’s full of good and bad photographers. There’s no reason to assume they’ll be any more or less skilled at ‘videography’. The Flickr community is actually very good at collectively surfacing the best contributions and with video only available to Pro users, that’ll act as an additional filter.

• Flickr’s a little more personal than YouTube- it’s largely photos for friends and family, rather than a wider broadcast. You’re more likely to see cute clips of a friend’s niece – like this – than a trailer for Iron Man.

I tend to shoot a handful of videos with my point & shoot or phone when I’m taking a whole lotta photos. When I’m looking at the photos of my nephew’s first visit, it makes sense to me that all the related media is contextualised in the same place, by the same application. I don’t wanna create a mashup, I just want to post.

I think Flickr made the right choices…now I’m just hoping I’ll be able to MMS video from my phone to Flickr real soon 🙂