Flickr account changes announced

[BLKRCAT]

Vimeo did a thing like this last year. They limited the amount of uploads or space you can use with your free account. They never went ahead and started deleting your content but rather locked your account from making further uploads until you adhered to their new specs. I think that flickr would benefit from taking this approach.

Simply changing the rules and deleting user data is pretty aggressive. It's the first time that I've heard of something like this online.

They have had ads on free accounts for quite some time now. Free users were mostly fine with Flickr placing ads on their photos without getting any of the revenue unlike sites like Youtube. It would be nice for flickr to show some mutual respect in the way they handle their restructuring.

 

[jarski]

... They [Vimeo] never went ahead and started deleting your content but rather locked your account from making further uploads until you adhered to their new specs. I think that flickr would benefit from taking this approach.
...

Iirc that’s how Flickr also used to work, once the pro subscription expired (prior the 1tb era they are now undoing).

 

[coogee]

Testing.

 

[Alberti]

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.

The high res uploads are in part due to the easy Lightroom coupling where you can export the files and they even are managed (changes passed on). yes, that upload is full res, I can't change that and I have always thought that Flickr would sell these images off to a well known [Calif.] photo selling site.
- and that that was their business model.
By the way, i think 1 TB space offered to 1 million users will in actual use not exceed 1% on average use.

 

[bulevardi]

Testing.

Another gnome lover !!!
Here's my FLICKR gnome gallery:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bulevardi/albums/72157631596960456

😀

 

[bulevardi]

Btw, I never have seen ads yet, on Flickr, even with my free account.
Where are they supposed to appear? Between your own photos in your gallery or in the Trending feed?
And on the mobile too...
Never had bugs. Unless, when using Flickr on the mobile version, my OS is going slower afterwards, and have to restart my device later on.

However, I always liked their way of messaging, the way of saying "hello" to the user, or showing the following when a downtime or something like this:

Bad, bad panda!

We’re aware of the problem and are fixing it.
Thanks for your patience.

 

[Out to Lunch]

Bad, bad panda!

We’re aware of the problem and are fixing it.
Thanks for your patience.

Internet etiquette equates the use of large fonts with shouting. So don't.

I've had a close look at alternative providers and I'll stick with a Pro Flickr account.

 

[olifaunt]

Simply changing the rules and deleting user data is pretty aggressive.

Yes.

The tone of their informational message announcing the changes reads (to me) very passive-aggressive overall, and this ransom demand crosses into blatant active aggression. You do not treat customers this way in a business and survive.

I kept telling people complaining about Yahoo's handling of the site - benign neglect is better than the alternatives. I wish I could say it made me happy to say I told you so.

(Too bad though. It is the only social media I use; I use it as a portfolio so I have less than 100 photos on anyway, so the change doesn't affect me directly, but I hate to see this happening.)

 

[olifaunt]

Btw, I never have seen ads yet, on Flickr, even with my free account.

No ads appear in my free account, another big advantage of the benign neglect under Yahoo.

But I don't expect that to remain the case.

 

[Highway 61]

The high res uploads are in part due to the easy Lightroom coupling where you can export the files and they even are managed (changes passed on). yes, that upload is full res, I can't change that and I have always thought that Flickr would sell these images off to a well known [Calif.] photo selling site.
- and that that was their business model.
By the way, i think 1 TB space offered to 1 million users will in actual use not exceed 1% on average use.

This fully makes sense and this is probably why the space storage unit at Flickr is now becoming the photo not the (mega, giga, tera)bytes any longer.
People like me having carefully downsized and "saved for the web" their black and white photos under full owner's copyright are now asked to pay to allow Flickr to go on with hosting full-res marketable images - mostly uploaded under CC copyright.

This is why I have no interest at obeying and paying. I will remove myself what I want to be removed to get under the 1,000 photos limit, won't upload anything else, and ite missa est.

Of course I fully understand that some of the posters here will want to continue with Flickr, and pay the $50 fee a year.

 

[olifaunt]

... are now asked to pay to allow Flickr to go on with hosting full-res marketable images - mostly uploaded under CC copyright.

I don't think the default copyright is Creative Commons. If you want it to be CC you have to state so explicitly. Otherwise, as far as I am aware, unless we explicitly opt out of our copyright, we retain full copyright for photos we upload to Flickr. We don't even have to put a copyright notice, it belongs to us by default, at least in U.S. law. Am I wrong?

And no, Flickr can't sell our photos. That would violate our copyright on them.

 

[Ted Striker]

My main issue with Instagram is that it is owned by Facebook.

Exactly. Spot on.

 

[bulevardi]

What are your thoughts about "500px" as alternative?

I'm personally not so satisfied from them.

 

[css9450]

Iirc that’s how Flickr also used to work, once the pro subscription expired (prior the 1tb era they are now undoing).

The way it used to be, the free limit was pretty small. I think 200 photos. If you paid for Pro, there was no limit. If you let Pro expire, the limit returned to just 200 photos, but no photos were ever deleted. Everything came back if you re-upped for pro.

The wording of this new policy scares me. It makes it sound like this time, they ARE going to be deleting photos. Something they haven't done in the past.

 

[ptpdprinter]

The wording of this new policy scares me. It makes it sound like this time, they ARE going to be deleting photos. Something they haven't done in the past.

And why wouldn't they. Maintaining storage costs money. It's like clearing out your temp directory. All of a sudden, you don't need a new hard drive.

 

[phrons]

Are we sure active accounts will be affected?

Maybe this will just be limited to accounts that have been inactive for a couple of years?

 

[Peter Jennings]

https://blog.flickr.net/en/2018/11/01/changing-flickr-free-accounts-1000-photos/

It’s all laid out in the blog post. SmugMug bought the thing and the changes they’re making are what they think is necessary to keep the place viable. Personally, I don’t understand all the Sturm und Drang.

 

[Godfrey]

Since I've had a pro account on Flickr since 2009, all I read out of this is that my annual fee is being doubled. Which isn't terrible; it's still a bargain. Whatever else they offer as gimmes with the new setup is just another plus that I may or may not take advantage of.

G

 

[maigo]

For the technically minded, this is an interesting Flickr code blog post from Jan 2017 that shares how they optimized their stored images to avoid adding any additional storage space through the 2016 year.

http://code.flickr.net/2017/01/05/a-year-without-a-byte/

I wonder how these storage engineers felt when they learned of the Smugmug plans to delete billions of images...



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[coogee]

Another gnome lover !!!
Here's my FLICKR gnome gallery:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bulevardi/albums/72157631596960456

😀

A lovely collection
Thanks for sharing them 😀

For the technically minded, this is an interesting Flickr code blog post from Jan 2017 that shares how they optimized their stored images to avoid adding any additional storage space through the 2016 year.

http://code.flickr.net/2017/01/05/a-year-without-a-byte/

I wonder how these storage engineers felt when they learned of the Smugmug plans to delete billions of images...

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks. Interesting stuff. The use of lossless compression with high CPU overheads and so on. None of it sounds much like something Ansel Adams would have said(!) I hope someone over there is a photographer :O