Flickr account changes announced

Now let's put it that way.

My 1,413 carefully edited photos all weighting 300KB each all make for a used storage space of 424MB.

According to the present terms and conditions of my free Flickr account, for which I have signed in, I've used less than 1% of my 1TB storage ability so far.

But the forecoming terms and conditions will suddenly tell that I have exceeded my storage ability by 41,3%.

Somehow I would have to chose between paying or leaving because of the SD cards dumpers flooding Flickr's drives with full-size image files : the storage space count unit will now be the photo, not the KB/MB/GB/TB any longer.

Dumb.
 
My pro subscription is renewed December 2019, after that I will continue to use flickr. It has been the best place for the last decade to store, organize, and share my photos. I've stuck with it since then, and will continue to do so into the future. The 50 bucks year will continue to be a valuable use of my money. As I prefer to pay for things as opposed to being advertised to, I'm all for this.

Plus, as others have said, the quality of photos, or at least I hope so, will go up as people are made to pay.
 
For people that don’t have a pro account (or don’t want to pay more for their pro account) and come in over the 1000 pic limit, a decision will need to be made. Delete some pics and still receive the benefits of the FREE service or spend money for unlimited storage and extra tools and features. For people like me who have less than 1000 images and carefully curate their photos, it works out fine. I’ll have to do nothing.

The free terabyte that Yahoo introduced when they took over was a dumb decision. It became an image dump site for many users not interested in any photo community aspect the site had to offer. I tried using it as a storage site after I first joined in 2013. It didn’t work well. The site just wasn’t designed to be used that way.

SmugMug seem to be doing the right thing with Flickr, now. Make it a premium site for pro users willing to pay and leave it free for casual users who don’t need a lot of features or storage. I hope it succeeds.
 
Ted Striker said:
Flickr is nowhere near being close to dead. Over 10,000 photos are uploaded there every minute. Hardly dead.
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I think you misunderstood. I know Flickr isn't dead (many of those photos uploaded are mine), but I was talking about Flickr as a community (which seems to be what SmugMug is interested in), not a photo hosting site.

The Flickr community is either dead or very, very ill. The groups that used to be a fantastic place for photographic discussion 5-10 years ago see almost no traffic now.
 
I use Flickr for family photos, over 10 years, to share with my family overseas. All curated into albums, well over 1000 photos. I had a blog originally when i emigrated, Fickr seemed am easier solution.

I paid for a pro account for this use right through from the beginning to now. Now i pay double overnight for nothing more, it’s not a very tempting value proposition to me.
I’ll explore going back to a blog.

I paid a decade of Pro fees to get treated like this does not make me feel a valued customer, more like extorted, double the price but no change in the fundamental service just some totally empty words on protection from advertisers.
 
I've been on Flickr since 2007, and went Pro a couple of years after that during the first of three site rebuilds. Got 416 Followers (oh, the poor lost ones), 159 that I bother to follow, and belong to 110 Groups. I have 13,656 photos and videos posted.

I'm not going to let the price increase drive me off. A lot of those photos are the product of camera and lens testing I did on over 200 cameras (a lot of them being P&S cams in the $1-to-$3 range). Pictures of camera repairs, car shows, special events, those are the type of postings where a hundred photos was a slow day, so theoretically it wouldn't take me long to have a complete turnover if I was under a 1000 image limit.

As for the doubling of the Pro account price, that's for us who were Grandfathered In when Ms Mayer tried to kill the Pro accounts, but then managed to raise the rate to $40 if I remember. So I've been operating on a discount for these last few years.

I put all my photos in Albums, and post a couple images to various Forums, with a link back to the album. 680 albums. I wouldn't need to download it all because I still have the originals right here, but the problem is all the descriptions, and tags would be lost, something I didn't bother to write down when making my upload lists.

So no, I'm not going to be leaving a bunch of holes all over the Internet over a price increase. This latest version of Flickr has been working well for me.

PF
 
There's no doubt Instagram has a much wider appeal. It's so wide that a lot of people who heaped scorn on early-days flickr are now there doing exactly what they mocked earlier. (I am thinking of some Magnum guys, primarily.) But isn't Instagram also tailormade for mobile use? I could be wrong. But that's a big difference AFAIC from flickr which still retains the pc-friendly interface, and that despite the many, mostly for the worse, changes. For this reason perhaps I prefer the latter.
 
Back in the days when I had a makeshift darkroom I would shoot self rolled film, and print the best. They may have been crap photos, but at least I was completing the circle by actually displaying my work. Mostly these days I just upload and share on forums, get a few likes and comments but this has to be less satisfying than seeing a print on the wall.

I have approx 600 images in / on Flickr, and I'm sure I can cut it drastically. At any time possibly 100 is more than enough for potential public consumption. The rest can and do sit on various hard drives, and for my analogue work, in negatives sleeves.

Flickr offering 1000 to free membership is very generous in my opinion.
 
Ricoh said:
Flickr offering 1000 to free membership is very generous in my opinion.
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Flickr offering 1000 photos to free membership is very dishonest in my opinion.

With that, people having done a serious, careful and reasonable editing job and wanting to display a long-run photographic production thanks to very low-weight photos well sorted by albums and all in all representing a very, very, very thin hard drive storage space are punished because of all the full-res digital images storage others use Flickr for without any care (and which many of use don't mind the least bit : if I like a photo at Flickr, I don't mandatory want to see it at a size that will exceed my screen dimensions by 300%). If you consider that most of those XXL photos flooding the servers storage space are uploaded by people having disabled the downloading option (a trick which can be turned out very easily anyway), you get the idea of how idiotic some flickerites' behaviour can be.

The photo used as the new storage space count unit instead of a regular number of bytes count unit, like normal people would do, is a very stupid new policy.

This is not a matter of paying a moderate fee or still getting it for free. It's a matter of honest game rules. Here, they are not.
 
Highway 61 said:
This is not a matter of paying a moderate fee or still getting it for free. It's a matter of honest game rules. Here, they are not.
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Yes, I agree with Highway here. It sounds like suicide. Maybe they just want to get rid of Flickr. They'll chase a lot of people away, that is sure.

Erik.
 
I’m sure the folks over at Flickr and SmugMug have a ton of statistics on hand and have studied the situation much more thoroughly than any of us here. If these changes were deemed necessary to keep the site viable, then so be it. Nothing about what they’re doing seems unfair or dishonest to me. I’ll continue to use it - for free - with no complaints.
 
I downloaded and archived all my Flickr content and deleted my account when SmugMug took over.

Long before that I felt Flickr became a place where people could steal your intellectual property.

I use a hosting service. It's $60 per year for a web hosting package with 6 GB data capacity, 6 databases, unlimited email, file sharing, etc. Customer support is excellent. Of course you do have to create a web site. This takes time and some investment in web software. Web software is not that expensive. For example, Lightroom has a decent web-site creation module. I use Sandvox (OS X, $80). Of course there are many other Apps as well.

I can archive unlimited image files (including raw) via Amazon Prime. There are many other solutions.

I think Flickr's value is its community. But there are other communities. Adobe CC subscribers have access to Behance. Behance is much more fragmented than Flickr, but it is a community for creatives to share work and get feedback.

This thread reminds me to revisit the RFF Gallery and benefit from the RFF community.
 
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