Flickr is one of the classic stories of a business that didn't recognise its market until it was too late. It was arguably the most popular place for people to post photos and share them online but completely missed the social media bandwagon and found itself usurped by Instagram and Facebook as the preferred way for people to share images. Now Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, is being sold to SmugMug - a site popular with professional photographers and "visual storytellers".

I just migrated my photos off of Flickr. Yes, it's 2017, and I was still using Flickr. Why? Because I'd been using it since 2005, it's free, and the mobile app is… fine. But now that it seems like Flickr is joining the likes of AOL and Earthlink in the internet graveyard, it's clearly time to leave. Why did it take this long for me to leave to begin with?

Cal Henderson is the co-founder and CTO of Slack, the leading workplace messaging platform, which Henderson's team invented while trying to build an online game called Glitch. That wasn't the first time Henderson and his Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield set out to build a game and ended up with a startup. In the early 2000s, Henderson joined Butterfield's team to build Game Neverending, which spawned the photo-sharing site Flickr. He's been programming (and blogging at iamcal.com) for 15 years.

At a for-profit editorial outlet like Lifehacker, when we need an image for our posts, we can't just do a Google image search and slap up the first result. We have to use properly licensed photos. Sometimes we use our own original photos, sometimes stock images that we pay for, sometimes the millions of Flickr photos licensed for free use through Creative Commons.

Earlier this year, Flickr locked its automatic uploading feature that pulls image files off an SD card and automatically uploads them to Flickr behind a paywall. If you don't want to shell out the $US5.99 ($8)/month for that, GitHub user drcursor has a solution that uses a Raspberry Pi.

Last month, both Google and Yahoo introduced big changes to their photo storage services, Google Photos and Flickr (4.0), respectively. Both offer identical, useful features: automatic photo backups, intelligent organisation, online editing tools and sharing capabilities. So which one should you use?

There are a few team communication tools out there, as decentralised work becomes more common. Slack is a new one from the co-founder of Flickr, Stewart Butterfield, and has already become quite popular without needing the advertising budget of Hipchat.

Most people have probably taken a picture of themselves or others with a mobile phone. If you put the pictures online while holding or wearing a product, you might be revealing more than a pretty smile to data mining companies.

Android/iOS: Today, Flickr received a brand new interface for its mobile app that aims to replicate a lot of the functionality of Instagram, because that's what photo apps do now.

Flickr is one of the best services available when it comes to organising your photos and sharing them with the world. It can also back up your photos and offers lots of free storage space. Still, it can be even better with a few useful tools made by users like yourself. Here are some of the best.

You can spend days and days reading reviews to find the perfect camera, but seeing the pictures a camera takes is the best way to gauge if it has what you're looking for. To see a lot of amateur and professional photos from any given camera, Wired suggests you look on Flickr.

Dear Lifehacker, I recently had a hard drive fail which contained lots of family photos which hadn't been backed up anywhere. After days of trying to get my photos back, I was successful, though they were all in an unsorted heap and I had to undertake the painstaking task of resorting them into photos again.

Hi Lifehacker, I was wondering whether I have full ownership and property rights for photos I upload to flickr? The offer of 1TB of space makes online photo backups enticing, but am I giving up too much? Thanks, Snap Happy

iOS: Flickr just scored an impressive update on iOS. You can now create custom filters and use Photoshop-grade editing tools and shooting grids.

Dear Lifehacker, I'm trying to start my own blog but am finding it difficult to find images I can use. Any ideas? Thanks, Picture Imperfect

Recently, Flickr gave all of its users 1 terabyte of free space. Reddit user rlaw68 shows how to utilise that space for more than just photos and videos.

Android: Yesterday, Flickr completely overhauled its web site and unveiled new free and paid plans. After that, it pushed a huge update to the Flickr Android app, one that brings the tiled gallery view and a few extra features for mobile users.

Yahoo!, in an attempt to make its photo-hosting service Flickr relevant again, has decided to offer 1TB of free space to all users. The downside? Everyone who doesn't pay $US50 per year gets ads.

From now until January 4 you can get three free months of Flickr's Pro account. You'll enjoy unlimited uploads and viewing of your photos and videos, the ability to post photos in up to 60 groups and you can also download your original photo files whenever you'd like, handy for photographers on the go.