Hello Flickr,

I want to acknowledge and thank you for your contributions to making Flickr the best photography community online. The core of Flickr’s success is you, our community of photographers, who not only capture the most amazing images from around the world, but who use your photos and the Flickr platform to communicate with each other and express your passion.

As we update Flickr to bring new technology, infrastructure, and improved functionality, we’re committed to hearing from all of you. Your feedback is vital to improving our products and we thank you for the thoughtful ideas you have shared with us to date. Over the past few months we’ve been gathering your feedback on the Flickr Ideas forum and we’ve been working to incorporate it into our product roadmap.

Have no doubt that we’ve seen your thoughts and that we take them seriously. We’ve begun to address the top-priority responses in Flickr Ideas and we will continue to do so over the course of the next few months. We’re explaining which features will shape future Flickr updates and, if we aren’t planning to incorporate your suggestions into the product roadmap, we will explain that to you.

When we redesigned Flickr in May 2013, we wanted to completely reimagine the Flickr photo experience, putting the focus on the photo while encouraging you to upload and share more of your images. We also wanted to reinvigorate Flickr by expanding the community to reach new users who had not previously considered Flickr a home for their photos. We’ve accomplished both of these goals, with new registrations increasing by 2x and daily photo uploads increasing 3x (occasionally even 7x!) across Flickr desktop and mobile.

What’s more, we’ve increased photo loading speeds on the redesigned photo page by a factor of 20 and we’ve seen remarkable increases in photo pageviews. We’ve begun to completely restructure Flickr search, with much more sophisticated visual, time, and location data points to better meet your search criteria. Finally, as more of the world consumes information from the computer in their hand, we are committed to transform the Flickr mobile experience. Mobile will be first for us.

At the same time, we recognize that the change hasn’t always been easy. We were working with years of legacy and incredible complexity. We needed to update our code, our server infrastructure and countless other backend minutia. We’ve taken an iterative approach and we’ve moved quickly to deliver improvements, but this is only the first step and we have a great deal to accomplish in 2014. We look forward to bringing you wonderful updates to the Flickr desktop, mobile and app experience, all of which will be shaped by your feedback.

Please continue to share your thoughts with us. While the Flickr Help Forum is a wonderful community space and useful for emergent issues and troubleshooting, please use the Flickr Ideas page for feature requests, product feedback and fresh new ideas. We’ll be starting a new weekly series of Help Forum Hot Topic posts with regular product updates from the product managers and engineers at the front lines of Flickr, as they explain to you what we’re working on and what’s new in the Flickrverse.

We have reinvigorated energies and resources. We’re constantly adding amazing engineering and designer talent to the Flickr team and we’re committed to making the Flickr experience more remarkable. We’re listening to you and we’re grateful for your commitment to keeping Flickr the amazing community that it is.

Bernardo Hernandez

Vice President, Flickr