Photography standards blur in a Flickr

Wired on Friday: I try not to write excessively about Google, fascinating though that child of a company is; I try not to write too much about Microsoft, conflicted and unexpected though their path has become. But they are giants, after all.

These days, I try not to write about Flickr. A tiny company barely two years old (recently bought by Yahoo!, another company we should not spend too much time upon), Flickr is essentially an online digital photograph album.

That said, they have a knack of uncovering ingenious uses for their members' photography. They're a fine model for how a small company from anywhere - they're from Toronto as it happens - can get it right and make it big online. Also, of course, pretty pictures are always nice to look at. In full disclosure, I have an account with them, and I'll try not to mention them again after this. But I challenge anyone not to spend far too much time with their newest feature, called "interestingness" - located at http://www.flickr.com/explore/ interesting.

You'd have to be pretty picky to not see this section as an amazing collection of photographs, many of which are free to reuse for your own purposes. But their brilliance is not a product of the company, except indirectly.

The pictures in this interestingness section are selected by an automatic filter, not unlike Google's method for finding good web pages or news stories. They are plucked from the public collections of the site's users. If a picture has many comments, or is marked as a favourite by an appreciable amount of Flickr users, a photograph will rise to the top.

When the filter works well, it's not unlike one of those catalogues of bright, colourful, professional stock photography. Bright, abstract images vie with beautiful portraits and cute animals and children. They look professional, yet almost all of their creators are amateurs, who may only come up with a handful or less great photographs in their lives.

But Flickr has a million amateurs, many of whom upload daily. The best of a million is not far from the best you can get, even from professionals. It's the sort of emergent beauty that makes some people wonder if professional photography can survive. With so many pictures for free, who wants to pay for them?

The truth is, we have two meanings for "professional", and they are not identical, although we wish they were. The first is "accomplished", a person who knows what he or she is doing, and has the resources, time, dedication and talent to do a good job.

The second is someone who has chosen a certain occupation requiring special skills as their career, and works to earn money at it.

Trade standards, the market, and the human tendency to do a good job attempt to make these two definitions identical; but they are not.

Now, we find, the best of the amateur world is swamping the market, and at the best price possible - free. And the amateurs are not only getting more coverage, they're also getting better. As Moore's Law grinds down the price of digital photography, technology is giving a lift to amateur photographers by placing new technology into their price range.

And there's another multiplier at work too. There was a time when one of the benefits enjoyed by a professional over a casual photographer was that the professional could afford to take more pictures. A lot more pictures: rolls and rolls of them. Now, with digital, everyone can have serendipity on their side.

(If you're a professional photographer, growing a little miffed at this comparison between your hard work and the arrayed amateur gallery of cute cats and dogs, let me says this: don't think about your own undoubted talents, but those of your worst competitor. That person who you cannot quite believe earns a living producing the work they do. Are they any better than the world's best amateur? There is clearly some overlap.)

The same pressure of excessive supply operates on many other producers. The forces arrayed against "professional" writers are even fiercer: the web is, after all, stitched together by endless freely supplied words, and the filters are growing better at choosing the best of those too.

Nonetheless, as much as I'd fight to preserve the paid market for my opinions, I personally find a smaller and smaller proportion of my reading originating from "professionals". Opinions are cheap and widespread; good photographs are getting cheaper, and better publicised.

Is this worrying? More especially, is it worrying for more than just newspaper hacks and pro shutterbugs? How does this switch to the amateur affect quality? Is what Flickr is showing us a glut of shoddy, sweat-labour produce, drowning out the quality merchandise? Or is it just more, good, free, stuff?

The end of professionalism? Of course not. What it does mean are new pressures on commercial photographers. Established markets whose profits were previously guaranteed will slowly evaporate - you can see this already in wedding photography.

And there will come a time when a chunk of the stock photography market will be eaten away as former customers choose from a carefully filtered glut of fine and free online stock photography, produced by generous amateurs; when professional photographers' beautiful work will jostle with the best of the amateurs.

We're already seeing this in a few places. The editor of the BBC's popular news site was recently criticised by professional photographers for inviting amateur snaps to be sent in to illustrate stories. His audience told him to pick what was best for the job.

And if that criteria continues to apply, will we ever know the difference?