Is Yahoo! Filling Flickr With Stock Photography?

Earlier this afternoon, we were horrified to find page after page of two searches produced Getty Images style stock photography. All the home shots, the weird shots, the budding amateur shots had been replaced with slick cliched shots you’d find over here.

For us, one of the joys of Flickr is the random nature of an image search fueled by the idiosyncrasies of user tagging. But page after page (we got to page 16) were full of posed shots.

We must suppose that Yahoo! has plans to make Flickr more of a image-resouce than an image pool and is therefore dumping stock images with their pre-existing tags into the library. Or Yahoo! thinks that users are more likely to buy ‘classy’ prints. Or maybe Yahoo! finds the real people a little too ugly.

Which would be a shame.

When we returned later to do the same search – parents – we couldn’t get the same results However, examination of the URLs for the earlier and later searches show differences in the URL.

Earlier search (with results that scared us)
Later search (with results we expected)