Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme

https://unsung.aresluna.org/unsung-heroes-flickrs-urls-scheme/

by onli • 5 months ago

294 99 5 months ago

unsung.aresluna.org

Tepix• 5 months ago

Concise URLs deserve more praise.

Also, when you look at a site and see URLs like /wiki/index.php/MyPage it tells you about the skill level and care of the site administrators.

theshrike79• 5 months ago

And a bit about the skill of whoever made the wiki software, they need better documentation and automation to help even less-skilled admins to have clean URLs

flexagoon• 5 months ago

They do have a guide for it

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL

treesknees• 5 months ago

We have one internal IT team who leaves things on non-standard ports, like https 8443 with no redirects on the standard ports. Drives me mad.

akares• 5 months ago

However, getting rid of the /photos prefix would be a terrible improvement.

Having the /{username} at the root of the routing logic means that every URL should either query the user database for a match or use /{username} as a catch-all fallback if no other patterns match. But this makes resolving real 404 pages much more expensive.

dcminter• 5 months ago

If you delete the photos path element they do actually have a fallback resolver that redirects you to the appropriate path under photos.

E.g. flickr.com/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904 does take you to flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904

outofmyshed• 5 months ago

The shift from URLs accessing resources on file systems to more abstract resources (implicitly HTML unless the headers said otherwise) occurred around 1999/2000. Suddenly we were all doing it once we’d figured out the necessary Apache directives. It wasn’t just Flickr, although it and its APIs were a good example of clean URL design

socalgal22• 5 months ago

I would also try to add a human-readable slug at the end, because…

No? Because what would it be based on and if you edited the thing that it's based on then the URL would either change, or get out of sync which woudl suck. You could ignore the suffix meaning flickr.com/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904-<everything-past-the-previous-dash-is-ignored> I'm not sure if that would be a positive, although I guess S.O. does something like that. The issue is other sites really want to know if it's a link to the same resource or a different resource. And while you could redirect to the new one that just makes more work for everyone.

I would get rid of /photos

I wouldn't because then you'd had have https://flickr.com/settings but that would not be a user named "settings" and the same for every other alternate purpose URL

KomoD2• 5 months ago

You could ignore the suffix meaning flickr.com/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904-<everything-past-the-previous-dash-is-ignored> I'm not sure if that would be a positive, although I guess S.O. does something like that.

That's usually how people do it.

onli2• 5 months ago

Yes, I saw that multiple times in blog engines, with the entry title being the optional part.

dylan6042• 5 months ago

I've seen these types of things break because of characters used after the dash separator would be deemed illegal by some part of the chain. However, if you delete everything after the separator just leaving the ID, the page would load. So some URL parser is choking because someone forgot to encode the URL somewhere upstream.

Just another reason to say who cares to human readable bits in the location. Most browsers hide that data anyways.

shakna2• 5 months ago

The issue is other sites really want to know if it's a link to the same resource or a different resource.

Thats what the canonical link is for, isn't it? [0]

RFC 6596 introduced it in 2012. Other websites, like search engines or social media, have been using it for a while.

[0] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

socalgal22• 5 months ago

Yes, and? That’s a boil the ocean solution. Every app and site needs to look up urls and update where as they didn’t before.

Macuyiko• 5 months ago

What I typically end up doing is just recalc the slug and see if it matches the provided one. If it doesn't redirect to the most up to date slug matching the id. Though who knows if those old SEO patterns still matter these days...

croisillon• 5 months ago

i don't understand the heat under ?&

?set=2546&pic=8597 is much easier to decipher than /2546/8597

wiradikusuma• 5 months ago

From my experience, query param is usually optional, also `?foo=1&bar=2` and `?bar=2&foo=1` should open the same page.

fshr• 5 months ago

If it's a permanent reference to a record wouldn't /sets/2546/pics/8597 make more sense?

sixeyes• 5 months ago

oh yeah i remember as a kid into webdev and php how some sites would have these CLEAN urls. seemed like magic to me.

KomoD2• 5 months ago

Alternatively, I would consider getting rid of numerical ids altogether and relying on name alone. Internet Archive does it at e.g. archive.org/details/leroy-lettering-sets, but that has some serious limitations that are not hard to imagine

They don't rely on title alone, it's a separate identifier. You can set it to anything and you can't change it afterwards but you can change the title.

steerpike• 5 months ago

Flickr deserves a lot of praise for a number of technical advances that I wish had seen wider adoption. Their API was one of the first and honestly still one of the most enjoyable to actually use as a developer. It's still full of incredibly interesting API calls that you wouldn't expect from it unless you read carefully. Did you know, for example, that flickr API will provide you with the bounding box co-ordinates of different types of places? From a neighbourhood all the way up to a continent?

They implemented the Where On Earth ID (WOEID) which was a super useful way of disambiguating different places that shared latitude and longitude (for example, being able to disambiguate the Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay and Sydney Harbour which all can potentially share the same lat/long co-ords).

They implemented machine tags which are tags in the form of -

namespace:predicate=value

Which, when it was implemented by other sites with machine tags allowed you to get and group all kinds of interesting combinations of content.

Yeah, honestly flickr had some incredible tech the was so much fun to explore and use. That their vision of what the web could be wasn't the one that won is one of the great losses of the web IMO.

mv43• 5 months ago

They were also publicly in "beta" for a few years, which provided a great example that it was okay to roll out experimental features to the public.

mv43• 5 months ago

Don't forget their "interestingness" algorithm that would determine which photos get to the top position in groups and other shares views. Way before ML ranking.

lich_king• 5 months ago

Funnily enough, I think it was also one of the early warnings of what's coming. The problem with the Flickr algorithm was that it ended up promoting a very predictable style of photos - mostly HDR landscapes - which in turn encouraged more photographers to emulate it. In its early years, it was a fantastic place to learn photography. In the "final" years, it was extremely homogenous and, frankly, boring.

est• 5 months ago

Flickr deserves a lot of praise for a number of technical advances that I wish had seen wider adoption.

Flickr + MechanicalTurk == ImageNet

The priceless legacy of Web 2.0 golden age

gwern• 5 months ago

You should write all that up! (I've been around for a while and I never used Flickr except as a casual, but I did know about a lot of mashups and even spent time using FlickrLickr for Wikipedia; yet I've never heard of... any of that.)

amadeuspagel• 5 months ago

(Alternatively, I would consider getting rid of numerical ids altogether and relying on name alone. Internet Archive does it at e.g. archive.org/details/leroy-lettering-sets, but that has some serious limitations that are not hard to imagine.)

I could try to imagine these limitations and how the Internet Archive overcomes them, but I'd prefer reading about it.

Springtime• 5 months ago

I'm always surprised that archive.org's URL scheme is still used. To this day uploads will have URLs like `/details/hey` and IIRC the only thing to distinguish them from other submissions with matching names is the auto appending of a digit. It feels like `New Folder (1)` for URLs.

Edit: I misremembered. They append the date to the URL to avoid name conflicts, like `/details/hey_20260122`.

I think Youtube got it right early. Make it short enough but random, so users won't be tempted to manually type it out and make mistakes but if they really do need to manually type it the length is reasonable. It also made sharing via SMS/Twitter limits more feasible.

extraduder_ire3• 5 months ago

I can't say that they don't for sure, but if I was designing the videoID youtube uses for URLs, I'd put a check character in there. For the rare case where it must be entered manually.

Would be nice to know if you'd made a typo rather than just hitting a blank ID in the vast space of all possible video IDs.

Markoff• 5 months ago

TIL Flickr still exists

Stopped caring about them when they cancelled their 1TB free storage after 5 years, company which can't be trusted long term with your data. Plus the UI was horrible anyway.

lucketone• 5 months ago

Free storage expectation registered

secretsatan• 5 months ago

I've gone back to flickr for my photo sharing, I've had a pro account for, checks account, oh jeez, 20 years. I stopped using facebook and meta, and it's a solid photo sharing service. I can send links and people just get the photos, imagine that!, no ads, clean interface, lovely.

karel-3d2• 5 months ago

In one of their transitions, they seemed to somehow deleted most of my photos. I don't know which one exactly, maybe it's my fault somehow.

I just know I didn't log in for 10+ years and now when I do, most of my photos are gone. Oh well

alias_neo• 5 months ago

They're also holding the photos that are left hostage; unless you pay them, you can't download the photos you have left there.

NKosmatos• 5 months ago

I agree 100% with the author, clean, easily readable and well structured URLs make the web a better place. URL is a hierarchical structure as introduced in the RFC1738 by a guy you might have heard, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web :-) https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1738

Easily readable URLs is something I learned in the 90s and I still try to enforce in everything I create.

noduerme2• 5 months ago

I'm a big fan of writing little bits of code into my URL routers that check for pages and try to correct typos. So if someone types https://some-awesome-site.org/jhon-davisdon it will check and correct it to /john-davidson. What's nice is always delivering the "canonical" link rel when you serve the correct page that way, too. I make the assumption that people still try to type links, sometimes ;)

xnx• 5 months ago

Sounds like mod_speling for Apache: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_speling.html

tclancy3• 5 months ago

This was a big thing around the time of Flickr and, if my memory is still working, del.icio.us. There was a push for “url is the new command line” which I wish had gotten more traction because there were some fun things happening. I feel like Yahoo Labs was involved in a lot of it, including Pipes and their ahead of its time JavaScript framework. It’s a strange sliding doors moment for me because I turned down a job there right around this time.

benterix• 5 months ago

Unfortunately things are going in the opposite direction with media platforms creating an encoded blob impossible to edit by hand so that you (or a tool) cannot strip tracking etc.

nkrisc3• 5 months ago

Isn’t the /photos kind of necessary since usernames are UGC? What if a username is “about” or “contact”?

I would be very confused if flickr.com/contact went to a user page.

dgl• 5 months ago

GitHub manage to do it. Most URLs you'd think of are either redirects to other bits of the site, or accounts owned by GitHub themselves. It just takes a bit of planning.

deaux• 5 months ago

It just takes a bit of planning.

Haha, no it just takes forcing user account name changes.

github.com/copilot, github.com/claude, github.com/models, basically everything you can think of for the last few years has been through this approach.

nkrisc3• 5 months ago

You can plan every "top level" path you'll ever want on the site from now until forever? Or do you mean planning as in plan to force account name changes on users when someone's username conflicts with a new feature name?

plutaniano• 5 months ago

I really like tiktok's solution to this problem. Every user page is prefixed with a @-sign.

tiktok.com/@about

tiktok.com/about

account424• 5 months ago

This has been around for way longer than tiktok but with ~ instead of @.

reddalo2• 5 months ago

YouTube had the same problem.

The oldest account have a direct URL in the form of youtube.com/username. Newer account had youtube.com/user/username (I think most account have both URLs).

Then YouTube was bought by Google and they introduced "channels", so some channels had youtube.com/channel/username.

Then YouTube wanted to become like TikTok and they forced at-usernames some years ago, so now accounts have a URL like youtube.com/@username

arcfour• 5 months ago

I remember signing up for an AI inference provider, noticing my profile page was "/<username>" and changing my name to logout which worked but caused some amusing errors. Oops!

DonHopkins• 5 months ago

Aww, they finally depreciated the .gne file extension? It was supposed to never end!

https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending

antonyh2• 5 months ago

Flickr was a hero, then yahoo/smugmug killed it. It's still there, but along the way all changes reduced it to an also-ran. It's still a nice tool, but I just don't see myself using it again. The URL scheme, as neat as it was, I never noticed or cared to hack at. I just wanted to upload photos.

embedding-shape• 5 months ago

I just wanted to upload photos.

Flickr is an unsung hero in this. I uploaded photos back in 2011 when I purchased my first DLSR camera, and had forgotten about them until this day, and seems they're still up! Did some other checks for content I uploaded back then, and seemingly only my YouTube and Vimeo videos are still up, everything else I spot checked from the same period seems to be gone by now.

Kind of neat for a free photo hosting platform.

dewey3• 5 months ago

then yahoo/smugmug killed it

I understand the Yahoo part, but what do you mean with smugmug? My impression was that they bought it and "revived" it but I might misremember the history there.

tclancy3• 5 months ago

They bought it but the revival was just the corpse moving around from heavy handed cpr attempts. It still lives thanks to the guy from Pinboard, but only as an archive really.

antonyh2• 5 months ago

Revived might be too strong a word, it's still a shadow of what it used to be. Besides, wasn't it Smugmug that introduced the 1000 photo limit for free users? I too could be misremembering here.

tristor• 5 months ago

I just wanted to upload photos.

You can absolutely still do this. I'm still a Flickr Pro subscriber since 2015, and I still regularly upload photos to Flickr. I don't think there was a set of changes that reduced Flickr to an also-ran, the entire market shifted. First, there was a shift away from photography being focused on what I will short hand as "quality" towards being focused on what I'll short hand as "moments" with services like Instagram, which had 100m users by the end of 2013 and continued growing exponentially from there, which was deeply interconnected with the introduction of reliable fairly high-quality phone cameras built into smart phones.

Flickr was, and continues to be, a place where people who use actual camera equipment post photos that are taken not just to capture a moment, but to express a scene, using technique and artistry to do so. That type of high quality photography doesn't really get much traction in more contemporary social media, because the photos of moments shared on Instagram weren't about the photo, they were about the moment. It was about proving that you were in a place or experienced a thing, and the place or thing giving you social value. "Pics or it didn't happen."

Instagram has now largely been supplanted by TikTok, because short video is now much more of a common, engaging, and desired format than photography, and thankfully this means Flickr in 2026 is once again a refuge of die-hard photographers sharing their works, and not seeing much attempt to change it into Instagram 2.0. Many (maybe most) of the photos on Flickr are now taken with smartphones, but there is still an expectation from the community to focus on expressing a scene using technique and artistry, and modern smartphones now have good enough cameras to do just that without detracting from what you're trying to express.

TrackerFF• 5 months ago

I don't know how much Flickr is used these days, but I remember it was quite popular some 15 years ago. I decided to search around, and discovered that it is a treasure trove of photos from the period 2005 - 2015, and incredibly easy to search / filter.

Internet archeology is something I've always found fascinating, and I don't think people realize how much data has been lost after we moved to the modern "big tech" internet of today. So many data hosting services disappear back in the mid/late 00s, and with that, the data too. After social media exploded, many just stared storing all their photos there.

eloisius• 5 months ago

It still has plenty of active users (myself included) but it feels much smaller than the 2010s. The groups are great if you can find ones that match your taste, and it’s way more fun to do that and share you photos with human-curated communities than with the algorithmic feed.

anon7000• 5 months ago

Interestingly, Washington state DOT uses it to post pictures for construction progress updates to this day. It’s great!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot

Oanid• 5 months ago

The government in British Columbia, Canada does as well - https://www.flickr.com/photos/tranbc/

jaffa2• 5 months ago

from the article : > This might seem silly. The user interface of URLs? Who types in or edits URLs by hand? But keyboards are still the most efficient entry device.

Can someone let Apple know this ? Safari URL bar is a disaster. If I edit a URL say to remove a part and hit enter 9/10 times it searches the internet.

It seems to forget that it's a url it's displaying despite it cutting the front off, even after telling it to use long urls in address bar. It's so annyoing I actually use another browser since I often need to paste in or modify urls for the work I do. Safari sucks hard. Any solutions to disabling 'search' in the address bar ? I want it to be a URL bar only, and anythign typed in it should be resolved and not searched.

koiueo• 5 months ago

You can let Apple know by not buying their products

tenpa0000• 5 months ago

The flip side is enumerable IDs. Back when I was scraping a site for a side project, sequential photo IDs were basically a free sitemap. YouTube's random-ish IDs aren't just branding — they at least make bulk harvesting annoying.

jeffbee• 5 months ago

You cannot afford to "bulk harvest" YouTube.

Yolopix• 5 months ago

Bulk harvesting doesn't necessarily mean downloading every video, there is still useful metadata. But in this case non-enumerable IDs are on purpose, it would defeat the "unlisted video" system.

thesuitonym• 5 months ago

I thought Photobucket did it better, with the exception of having to know which server an individual's bucket was on.

It's been a long while, but if I recall, the url schema was something like a00.photobucket.com/albums/username/someimage.jpg

But what was really cool about it was that you could change someimage.jpg to someimage.png and Photobucket would serve a PNG instead. Or you could change someimage.jpg to th_someimage.jpg and Photobucket would serve a thumbnail of the picture. It was very cool.

dylan6042• 5 months ago

I use a couple of JS libraries to serve image galleries, and they conform to the Flickr _[a-z] type of naming to indicate resolution. The library will load the appropriate size based on the available real estate.

The auto serving of the chosen output extension is interesting. Wonder if they were automatically created when making the various image sizes, or only on the first time it was requested. And how many formats were supported? The one that got me was hitting an API and tagging with xml|json to get the response as needed instead of sending it as a dedicated query paramter

dizlexic• 5 months ago

No parameters with their unpleasant ?&= syntax.

I'm sorry what? URL params are just a thing.

briandoll• 5 months ago

Good post on URL design (GitHub design team): https://warpspire.com/posts/url-design/

pwdisswordfishy• 5 months ago

What's so special about "https:"?

wackget• 5 months ago

Strange, because I always remember Flickr having horrible UX. You could never just open an image file directly; if you tried, Flickr would always redirect you to a page which obscured the image behind an invisible layer which obscured pointer events such as right-click.

I learned quickly to avoid Flickr links.

onli2• 5 months ago

Maybe it was like that for a while? But flickr allowed image downloads, there was a dropdown in the UI with the available sizes for years. And it had an API (+stable URLs) to download images.

It's possible they did not allow the way you tried to access images directly, to enable control of the downloads for the photographer. But I think you misjudged the behaviour back then, they were pretty open.

PpEY4fu85hkQpn• 5 months ago

I believe that is to prevent hotlinking, which isn't the purpose of the service.

extraduder_ire3• 5 months ago

That would make finding the URL to hotlink harder, but wouldn't prevent it.

Typically, sites check that the referer header is from one of their sites to prevent hotlinking.

mullingitover• 5 months ago

Can't say enough good things about flickr. Those people nailed it in 2004 (I've been a paying subscriber since their first year) and everyone else has been making bad copies ever since. Tagging, friends (pretty much inventing social media without any of the diabolical dark patterns), full-resolution archival storage, a solid API, all over two decades ago. I'm frankly embarrassed for things like Instagram, it's like they're not even trying.

Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme

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