Online photo sharing
2004 (Flickr); 2010 (Instagram)
Websites and apps where people post photos, comment and follow each other turned photography into a form of conversation. Billions of pictures are shared each day.
How it began
Websites for storing photos existed by the late 1990s. Flickr, launched in Vancouver in 2004, added tags, comments, groups and Creative Commons licences, and became the meeting place for photographers online.
How it works
Photos are uploaded and resized for the web as JPEGs. Others can comment, favourite and follow. Instagram, launched in 2010 for the iPhone, made sharing a single step from the camera.
Why it mattered
Photography became a way of talking, and pictures of the moment replaced the family album. Flickr’s Creative Commons pool also became a large source of freely licensed photographs.
Limits and what replaced it
Shared pictures are compressed and often fleeting. Platforms rise and fall, and their rules on privacy, ownership and algorithms shape what gets seen.
Today
Social networks and messaging are the main place most photos are seen.