Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts
blog.flickr.netWhile I understand why they are adding a limit, the concept of just deleting the photos over the 1000 limit just unsettles me, and will almost certainly cause link rot, which is both sad and annoying when I encounter it.
I don't know what my dad will do, he's been using Flickr for quite a few years now, he used to pay for pro, but then stopped doing so after Yahoo bought Flickr and started breaking the UI. He has over 1000 photos, but I am not sure if the pro features are worth the price for him. Fortunately he has local backups of every photo, but it does feel like his photos have been held to ransom. He probably would be willing to pay some money (but less than the current pro) just for the extra storage (and none of the extra features), from what I understand.
To conclude this wall of text, I understand why they're doing it, and hopefully it will make Flickr sustainable, but I feel the way it was done will cause problems when it happens (if it only stopped an account from uploading if it had too many photos, that would help a lot to avoid link rot), and might also cause problems in the future (while morbid to think about, if a pro user dies, they won't be able to pay and a bunch of their images will just get deleted, which could be bad for their families)...
EDIT: fix a few spelling errors and tyops
UPDATE: my dad's response to this is that he will pay for pro to keep his images online. In general, he doesn't feel like Pro is intended for him because it has features he doesn't really care about, he only cares about the storage and community stuff, not the statistics and software stuff.
I didn't see any mention of deleting photos that were over the limit. Hopefully they do what Flickr used to do, which is make only the last 1000 photos publicly visible.
"Free members with more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded to Flickr have until Tuesday, January 8, 2019, to upgrade to Pro or download content over the limit. After January 8, 2019, members over the limit will no longer be able to upload new photos to Flickr. After February 5, 2019, free accounts that contain over 1,000 photos or videos will have content actively deleted -- starting from oldest to newest date uploaded -- to meet the new limit."
From the home page.
What I find amazing is how quickly they are doing it. You'd think they would have 12 months type thing after the 'no upload' before they delete to maintain good will. What if someone is ill or travelling. Seems there will be a bunch of people who lose photos before they realise.
They waited quite long. 1tb is not nothing and I have backuped to Flickr for that reason but I'm not doing anything there
Yahoo might have been able to afford it.
Otherwise pro user still paying for it. Everyone else didn't. Why should they care what people think of them who didn't pay anyway?
Well... It would have been nice if they warned people earlier because it is quite a big thing to happen.
A possible reason why someone running a website should care about keeping stuff up is to avoid link rot, to me it feels like part of bejng a good Internet citizen is to ensure that a change to your website doesn't break other websites or links where possible and reasonable. (if people want stuff removed, then that's fine though).
However, it might be that it's too expensive to even just keep stuff up, so fair enough, but if that is the case, I feel more warning would have helped a bit here.
It says that they will be "actively deleted", which doesn't sound like they're going to be hidden.
EDIT: correction, it says they'll first be hidden for about a month, then they will be "actively deleted".
It doesn't say anything about hiding photos, that I can find?
It does say that if you were over 1000, you have a month where you can't upload any additional photos, but before they start deleting photos.
Huh... Maybe I misread, either way, its a similar sort of concept, and still ends with deletion.
https://www.flickr.com/lookingahead/
> Free members with more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded to Flickr have until Tuesday, January 8, 2019, to upgrade to Pro or download content over the limit. After January 8, 2019, members over the limit will no longer be able to upload new photos to Flickr. After February 5, 2019, free accounts that contain over 1,000 photos or videos will have content actively deleted -- starting from oldest to newest date uploaded -- to meet the new limit.
Luckily, almost no one uses flickr anymore these days, not gonna be that much rot.
Well, that's the problem- it's all the people who uploaded images years ago, it's those links and images that will rot.
SmugMug is really bringing back sanity into Flickr, good to see this after the Yahoo fiasco.
I created Talegraph [1] as a platform to tell stories with your pictures, and it has been hard for us to explain to users why paying for the product is the only way to ensure your pictures will stay online and private. Paying for what you use & privacy is not something normal people are used to, but this is the only sustainable way imo.
This looks like just the product I need to move away from putting my travel snaps on Facebook. Instagram isn't suited for albums and Flickr is hard to build a narrative with. Looking forward to trying it out after my next trip!
Thanks, this is exactly why we started working on Talegraph :)
This does look really nice!
Have you looked into automatically generating "travel tracks" for each chapter in a Tale from OwnTracks data?[1] An integration like that would definitely make Premium more appealing, and be more interesting than a map with a "pin" on it.
Do you have any plans to add an export ("take out") option that will allow you to download the images, text, captions, etc. as JSON? I worry about investing the time to create some beautiful "tales" but not having a good way to archive them in case you are acquired / shutdown / decide to call it quits.
Thanks! I plan to add tracks to the maps feature. I only added maps recently and this is the next logical step. I did not know about OwnTracks but I definitely plan to allow importing external GPS data, in addition to EXIF GPS data. For the data export, this is definitely planned. I can do it manually right know if you ask for it, but creating a process to do it automatically is not the top priority. But we will not shutdown or be acquired before this is in place. I got screwed too many time by other SaaS who just disappeared so I dont want to repeat this with my users.
Good luck with this! Way back 10 years ago I started a private ning group for close old friends who were still very conservative online. Un & pw protected closed community. They are mostly on FB now and just don't understand about your digital rights online.
I think and hope people may start waking up a bit with the FB and Yahoo fiascos...
This looks interesting. Does it support import from the SmugMug API or from other sources?
I would love to do it, but unfortunately most APIs forbid imports and only allow you to store pictures for caching purposes (Flickr [1], Google Photos [2]) and have restrictions / heavy fees for commercial usage.
Dropbox import is planned, I havent looked at SmugMug API's terms yet but will add it to the todolist.
[1] https://www.flickr.com/help/terms/api [2] https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/acceptab...
Interesting. This is a grave argument against using those services. Thanks.
Is that if the service does it, or if the users do it?
When I moved my photos from Flickr to SmugMug a few years back they (SmugMug) had a browser plugin that moved everything over. I thought it was odd, but figured it was to get around some kind of rule like that.
Yes this could work, and even if the API terms do not allow it (ie Google Photos API do not allow you to download the pictures for storage) you can use the Data Export feature that most websites have and use this export to upload back your data elsewhere.
Why shouldn't I host it myself for €5/month?
Because for 5 / month you won’t get the software?
I asked because it doesn't look like much from the examples. Picture gallery with some text. Maybe I'm missing something special here.
They're giving 3 month's notice of the automatic deletion of any photos over the 1000 allowed free ones. Not much time and sure to catch out people who don't log in/check their email frequently (including their spam folders) or who have technical problems (crap upload speeds, no capacity to download and store gigs of what might be the only existent copies of photos). I wonder if they'd be better of holding onto the soon to be deleted content for a lot longer, as they're hardly likely to go bust continuing to host it a little longer. I guess moving them to a non-free account would feel a like like extortion but surely this is worse - photos which were uploaded many years ago lost forever.
Much as I try and avoid using Google, I stick with them for the free email and unlimited photo storage.
I would feel better if they just grandfathered in any existing photos and made the change to all new uploads going forward. I'm generally OK with the reasons behind the move, but having people lose data because they were using the product in a way they were explicitly told was OK to use it at that time leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Yeah, two months' notice does not meet my definition of "ample time to upgrade to Pro [...] or download your photos and videos.*" And it's scummy to hide the timeline in a tiny footnote. I'm sure plenty of these people are using it as a backup solution and never even visiting the site. Totally fine with the decision not to support those users anymore, but it's not reasonable to nuke their data in 3 months because some email notice got lost in their inbox.
It took 3 days to get my data download request response, I have about ninety 300 megabyte zip files of photos, and at my maximum download rate it would take a couple of weeks to download, plus there's an unspecified time limit where the zip files are deleted from their servers and one has to request the data again.
> Much as I try and avoid using Google, I stick with them for the free email and unlimited photo storage.
I'm actually quite fearful of the day when Google will end its generous offer... We often see cloud providers struggling to cope with “unlimited” free plans, perhaps we should take all of them with a grain of salt and rely on local backups precisely to avoid the quasi-extortion that comes when the “unlimited cloud” mantra goes downhill.
AFAIK -
1)Gmail is free but does have a storage limit.
2) You can have an unlimited # of photos but not at full/original resolution. If you want full/orig you have to pay.
p.s. "...perhaps we should take all of them with a grain of salt..." Do you mean you haven't been doing this already? :)
Indeed, Gmail does have a limit, but Google Photos still lets you upload “unlimited” photos on that lower quality plan — which is more than enough for a vast majority of users.
I've began noticing the issues of large-scale cloud storage with the OneDrive fiasco, so I learned my lessons the hard way over there. But unfortunately too many people remain invested in such ecosystems and have no idea of the risks involved...
They downsample the images, which is why I don't use it. Gmail is large, but not unlimited.
Besides the gigabyte price of a harddrive is about 0.02[0], so if google makes a dollar more in advertising it can afford to store quite a bit...
[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
I use Google for my 'main' feed of photos just because Photos is an excellent product and I don't mind if they are downsampled for sharing or posting online.
I also keep all of all of my processed RAW files on Amazon Prime Photos. I never log into the app though, it's simply just my offsite backup. My NAS automatically syncs to Amazon Photos weekly.
I agree it's not enough time, and is screwing over the least technical users. Even if they don't want to actively host photos, they could archive it so when users log in they can say "Hey all the photos are in long term archival...download them now, or pay for an account".
Amazon offers unlimited full resolution photo storage for Prime users...I think I'll move my items there.
> Not much time and sure to catch out people ...
We live in a world where most people get twitchy if they haven't looked at their phone for an hour - how is 3 months notice considered so hugely unacceptable in this particular circumstance?
> ... who don't log in/check their email frequently (including their spam folders) or who have technical problems (crap upload speeds, no capacity to download and store gigs of what might be the only existent copies of photos).
This really does sound like a tiny minority of Internet users - sufficient bandwidth and tech savvy to upload > 1000 photos back in the good old days - but insufficient attention, bandwidth, or local storage a decade later to host their own photos.
Just how many people are out there that uploaded to flickr / yahoo and then deleted their local copies of their photos? And how much pandering are they expecting?
"Here's a system I uploaded my most important memories to, but I only look at them every 6 months, and I didn't pay for their storage, but I'm confident that where I dumped them a decade ago will be where they'll stay forever."
It might be a nice Flickr feature -- even if you had no plans of leaving Flickr -- to auto-transfer all of your photos to some other storage service. Even something like Amazon Glacier, which would obviously not be a competitor to Flickr. The user would, of course, be responsible for having, maintaining, paying for, etc., this other storage service.
Google's "free" unlimited photo storage comes with some costs. First, they compress and resize your photos. They're pretty public about this, and they do offer paid plans which don't do this. If you're fine with that, great, it's a good deal. Second, it's widely understood that they're likely mining data in your photos to profile and advertise to you. I can't know this for sure, since I can't see their source code, but other research shows fairly strong correlation evidence. (No idea if paying for storage removes this or not).
> but other research shows fairly strong correlation evidence
I'd be very interested in looking at this research and evidence of correlation between ads and photo data. Can you please cite the reference?
You should ask someone in Europe who use the same tools to do a GDPR request on their data. Something interesting may show up.
No need, its spelled out pretty clearly in Google's TOS [0]:
> Some of our Services allow you to upload, submit, store, send or receive content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
> When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.
> Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.
Is there an obvious way to get a total count of the number of photos you currently have uploaded?
It says it right on your flickr account page, in the header.
They didn't even have export tools last time I looked. I had to use an open source java application to download my photographs.
They have a one-click button in the user account settings to download all your data.
have you actually tried it? because i did, when i was trying to close out my flickr account, and it failed miserably. every third or fourth photo downloaded was corrupted. all the free options i tried weren't much better. i wound up paying for a third-party app i used exactly once, to get all my photos out.
So in summary Flickr is giving free users hosting for 1000 photos of unlimited quality vs. 1TB of free storage to refocus on photography vs. data mining for advertising. Makes sense to me.
When you look at the comments on Reddit, you can see that unfortunately it does not make sense for many people who put free as their first priority, versus privacy/sustainability/data concerns. Very brave for Flickr to make this move and face all those critics, even if this is for the best on the long term.
I would be very careful about drawing any sort of general conclusion from self-selected Reddit users. The most entitled people are going to complain loudly but I'd be skeptical that they're a substantial percentage of the people who contribute any value to Flickr.
Arguably the people who value free over everything else aren't good customers and aren't a good foundation to build an actual sustainable business on.
Arguably, free tier users are potential customers, not customers.
I'd say if you offer a service and someone takes you up on the offer, they are your customer.
They are not customers if they don't pay.
While they may not be a good foundation to build upon, they are good marketers. Just a roundabout way of saying adoption begets adoption and barriers are the opposite (though sometimes the trade-off is worth it as may be the case here).
I would wager Flickr stopped growing significantly a while ago, and therefore doesn't benefit from any marketing that people with free accounts might do for them.
And as the saying goes in creative industries: you can't eat "exposure." The only way to make money is the charge money, and it's generally worth it even if it means pissing off people who expect stuff for free.
Heck I bet this change will drive up awareness of Flickr. I can't even remember what I have there, but now I'm going to look up my creds and log in to find out.
Stopped paying for pro a few years ago because of arrogance and hubris that was common in the web darlings of the last ten years. Couldn't get a simple customer service request answered without snark or condescension. Garbage redesigns of the layout and refusal to listen to feedback meant you were paying for storage and nothing more (pretensions about "community" notwithstanding).
On the other hand, my limited interactions with Smugmug have been stellar. I really like those guys and wish them luck.
The joy of Flickr was exploring the random pictures from ordinary people. I could care less about the heavily Photoshopped "prosumer" stuff that seems to be more popular on the platform. I liked seeing natural skill at composition instead of digital post-processing.
Unfortunately, it looks like SmugMug wants Flickr to be more like SmugMug, so I don't see myself buying back into pro.
Flickr to me was mostly about sharing my photos with friends and family before facebook killed that use case. I don't use facebook much any more, but no one else in my circle uses Flickr either.
Deleting photos over the limit is a bit annoying though. I seem to remember in the past they just made them temporarily inaccessible if you let Pro lapse for a bit (while travelling or whatever).
Time to whip up something that will compare what I have uploaded on flickr (4000+ photos over 12 years) to what's on my local backups so I can download what I have to and forget about the rest.
For what it's worth, we definitely don't want Flickr to be more like SmugMug. Flickr is amazing and different and that's great. We want Flickr to be Flickr and that's what we're investing in. We'd be thrilled to have you back as Pro, and I promise we'll work hard to keep you.
One thing that's scary to me as someone who will be affected is the thought that one day, so much of my work could be just gone.
I am not a full-time photographer; there are runs of time every year where I spend a lot of of time shooting (e.g. live music gigs), and then long periods of inactivity.
I have over 1000 photos on Flickr. I've been a user for over a decade. And I found out about this change from this post, because I haven't been reading the associated Yahoo email that often.
So, leaving my account alone for 3 months = losing most of my photos forever.
Great.
Just the service I want to pay for.
I understand the business need, but perhaps could you take it easy on irreversible changes? Sure, make the photos over the 1K limit unavailable even to the account holders -- but let them buy the access back long after the change.
Not only you might get more subscriptions from that alone, but there's also this:
Unlimited storage might not be feasible for a fixed pricd. Photos are growing larger, dollar is getting cheaper - we're betting on HDD costs going down, but that's not a given.
You might need to have a change in the future.
Again.
And I don't want to lose data because I'd have missed that announcement - just like I missed this one.
How you treat your free users indicates what the paying attention ones can expect.
Please, for the sake of everything that's holy, give your devoted users some goddamn peace of mind that they can camp in the mountains for a year and don't return to see their data gone.
Yahoo! screwed up there - but two wrongs do not make a right.
Not all of us use the service every day. Take it easy on annihilating work and memories.
TL;DR: every account whose data you keep is a potential subscription. Every user whose data you deleted is a guaranteed loss of business and eternal scorn. Please take care of your intermittent, but devoted users.
I actually don't have any email about this in either my linked Yahoo account or my "primary email" in Flickr which is my main gmail account.
So reading your email apparently wouldn't have helped you at all.
Great job, SmugMug.
It takes time (as in, many days) to notify >100M people. We're working on it. The blog post and assorted spontaneous coverage, like Hacker News, is faster.
Even then, targeting the most affected ones (those on free plans with more than, say, 900 photos) first is, I assume, a much simpler job that might save you from a bit of a public scrutiny and give those people an extra jiffy or two to act.
And here I was erring on the side of me being at fault. How do they assume people know about it?
We don't assume. There will be frequent, and increasing, notifications. No-one wants to fail to notify people less than I do.
Thank you!
A 'devoted user' that doesn't pay for the service, doesn't read the emails they send, and logs on at less than 3 month intervals?
I keep my full photo archive synced between a server, two workstations, and two laptops -- spread across at least two physical locations. I can't begin to imagine the thinking of someone who keeps all their photos on a single vendor's system, especially without some sturdy SLA in place (and even then...).
> I can't begin to imagine the thinking of someone who keeps all their photos on a single vendor's system
Quite a few assumptions you are making here.
I have all my photos since 2003 backed up. But I didn't keep track of all the sets I shared with people over a decade (I'm wiser now), and selecting the photos to present to other people takes a long time for me.
>A 'devoted user' that doesn't pay for the service
By that logic, there are no devoted FOSS users, no devoted redditors, etc. And as SmugMug said: I was paying for the service with my data. Now they want me to pay with money, and I am OK with that too.
>doesn't read the emails they send
...they didn't even send any. I assumed the fault was on my part; it was not.
>and logs on at less than 3 month intervals?
My usage pattern is intermittent periods of heavy usage, and that has been consistent over the past 10+ years. That is why I call myself a devoted user; I've stayed with them through Yahoo! and SmugMug acquisitions, and haven't shared photos with anything other than Flickr in the past 5 years.
This is the point I am trying to communicate: devoted users aren't just the ones who use the service all the time.
I think complaining about changes being made to a free service is a losing battle, but I'll go along with you a bit longer.
It sounded sarcastic when you said:
But if you were actually paying them, this wouldn't be a problem.So, leaving my account alone for 3 months = losing most of my photos forever. Great. Just the service I want to pay for.And no, I don't quite understand your recent claim that you were paying them with your data - that's not paying, and clearly your expectations were not aligned with the actual contract (or absence of same) that you had/have with the company.
You've since stated you have all your photos since 2003 backed up, but you claimed originally that this change of policy for non-paying users would see you 'losing most of my photos forever'. So, which is it?
If it's just 'sets of photos that you've selected to share with people' then that doesn't really mesh with your earlier complaints.
Your other complaint - that you haven't received an email they haven't sent yet - is disingenuous. The announcement was made on their web site, and (I'm sure) emails will follow. Mail-outs are typically staggered over many hours, perhaps days - but you typically want the web announcement available first. In the unlikely event you don't get an email in the next couple of days (though it sounds like you don't read that email account either, and haven't in your ten years of using this service thought to change your account's contact email address) then I'll concede this point.
>and haven't in your ten years of using this service thought to change your account's contact email address
OK, I really need to ask: are you a Flickr user?
When Yahoo! bought Flickr and forced everyone to use a Yahoo! login, it became extremely inconvenient not to tie your Flickr account to your Yahoo account if you have one, and I do. Logging in to Yahoo! mail would automatically log you in to Flickr (still does!).
Furthermore, if you have several accounts, you can't get notifications from all of them on an email that's used for logging into one of them.
You just can't. You get an "email associated with another account" error.
It so happens that I use my primary email as a login for a Flickr! account that I use for live music photography only (and, by the way, no notifications there either!) -- but that account has <1000 photos, so it won't be affected.
The whole use-email-as-login policy that Yahoo! instilled on users is a clusterfuck, but that's what it's been, and simply setting a contact email on the account requires jumping through some hoops. (..I am very glad that Flickr will finally move away from that).
So I have to ask: are you a Flickr user, or are you just arguing hypothetically on behalf of SmugMug?
Anyway. My main point was that I see nothing wrong with holding data for ransom, but deleting it without recovery options on a short notice is a very, very bad move. And three months for me is a very short notice in the context of my 10+ years of using the service.
I have a yahoo account or two, and I think I have a flickr account somewhere ... but as a general rule I don't / wouldn't keep a sole copy of data that I care about on a free-hosting system that I know can't contact me.
>and I think I have a flickr account somewhere
Thank you.
So, you are not an active user of the platform we are discussing here, you are not affected by the update, and you don't know what it is that I'm talking about except for in general terms.
In light of that, stating your opinion on whether I can call myself a devoted user, and comment on what I should or should not expect from the service that you are not using seems.. mysterious?
And I didn't even get into a fraction of features and data that Flickr stores with photos (comments, photos being part of a set, etc -- Flickr is a social network, after all) that are hard or nearly impossible to back up. We are not discussing the merits of backups here, but let's not pretend that users who back up their files meticulously will not be adversely affected if they don't pay up within 3 months.
You make it sound like I've never seen people on the internet whinge about how something they weren't paying for is changing their T&C's and the person who isn't paying for the service is very upset by this because ... reasons.
I think I can question your devotion to a service by how much you're willing to pay to use it (and how much you complain about it).
You appear to be complaining about having to stump up ~ USD$2 / month to continue to enjoy the same carefree usage you've managed to obtain for free for the last decade.
Aha - I see you redacted your complaint about a personal email not arriving after onethumb responded in another thread saying much the same that I did (email takes time to send / propagate).
When flicker announced 1tb free I never thought 'oh great that sounds like a save env for my images' I thought 'lets dump my images' there as a free backup let's look how long they will offer it.
SmugMug is built on intermittent, but devoted users. Always a great reminder, though. Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.
Great to hear that, and looking forward to seeing Flickr improve!
I have been using Flickr to archive my photos since 2013 when they announced a 1TB limit for free users, and have been paying them $50/year since 2016 when they limited availability to Pro users for their first-party auto-upload tool ( http://flickr.com/uploadr ).
It did seem like the 1TB limit was too good to last when it was announced 5 years ago.
Still, it's a relatively inexpensive extra archive for my photos (400GB) that supplements other backups. The archive is sorta searchable and kinda good for sharing with family and friends.
I haven't really used their social or community features (the Explore experience, the magic donkey, and the pandas are all alien to me -- https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/361974994 , http://code.flickr.net/2009/03/03/panda-tuesday-the-history-... ).
Thanks! I'd love to know how we can improve on "sorta searchable" if you have some feedback?
Let me see my photos (and only my photos) on the map view. This used to be a link on my profile, I used it often to track photos to locations. Now the map view seems to just be a global view of everyone bunched together.
Too much of searching currently is based on keyword. But photos should be able to be easily searched other ways, like date, location, color, etc. If I could search all of those and limit it to myself or a friends photostream it would really help me find what I'm looking for.
Great feedback, thanks. I personally use this exact search (my photos on a map) on SmugMug, so clearly something we should re-introduce to Flickr (or maybe just make easier to find?). I'll investigate.
A combined personal map view with the ability to place any of my un-geotagged images (thanks SnapBridge!) would be most welcome.
Copy Google Photos' deep learning photo system
I use it all the time to search my own photos. It tries to figure out the content of the images so I can search for "horses" and it will find every image I have of horses (well of course it's not perfect).
We have this at Flickr already and it's pretty fantastic, imho. Is there a specific taxonomy or tag we're not detecting properly? Thanks for the feedback!
@onethumb Flickr Pro user here since 2007. There used to be an "Archive" view that had a calendar you could click through and see pictures taken or uploaded on a specific date. I haven't been able to find it since the Camera Roll feature launched.
Camera Roll is certainly useful, but I'd love if I could just quickly click on a calendar and see photos from a certain date rather than waiting for Camera Roll to load up and scrolling/filtering through the huge list. I realize Camera Roll has this feature as well, but I miss the old "Archive" version.
Ooh, I found it! If you visit someone's else's About page (like mine: https://www.flickr.com/people/donmacaskill/ ) and click on my join date, you'll see the calendar interface. Presumably, you want to be able to do this on your own photos? I'm not sure why you can't, but I'm finding out. :)
Thanks for being a customer, and thanks for the feedback. I'll look into whether we can revive this or not. Were you using it to find your own photos, or photos from the community, or... ?
I've been a Pro user for a long time before Yahoo started to screw things up badly. Flickr is only alive today because of the communities that use it. A lot of bloggers used and still use it to share pictures that are freely licensed (CC-BY-*), you should at least consider to keep those in some form or another or provide the means to redirect the links from the search result.
I love Creative Commons and I'm actively involved in thinking about and solving this problem. See their blog post today: https://creativecommons.org/2018/11/01/flickr-2/
Search has been broken and half-assed for a long time. Just look at the last decade's worth of bug reports and suggestions.
This is the death knell for Flickr. I've relied heavily on Flickr advanced search to find nature photos of particular plant and animal species. This new policy will undoubtedly results in many photos being deleted, and therefore limiting the search results. Their large archive of photos is/was a real asset, albeit one they haven't been smart enough to monetize effectively. Deleting these photos is just another small step in the slow disintegration of the site, sadly.
I wish they would at least leave creative commons licensed pictures, so many will likely disappear - it's such a shame.
My thoughts exactly, those are the images I typically search. Wikimedia commons does seem to have a bot (and/or some kind of manual process) that collects some of the creative commons photos from Flickr, but not all of them, even if they are good photos that are well-tagged. I usually search both sites, so I have a good sense of how often a photo appears one on site and not the other. Incidentally, it would sure be nice if Wikimedia commons allowed you to filter by license type.
I do hope some bot out there is collecting and archiving Flickr's creative commons photos before they disappear for good.
> nature photos of particular plant and animal species
It's not a like-for-like replacement, but GBIF (my employer) indexes a fairly large collection now. You need a scientific (Latin) name for an effective search.
HN's favourite genera are presumably these three: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/gallery?media_type=StillImag...
NB the "license" filter applies to the text parts of the record, many images have a different license.
I don't see why it's a death knell - as the linked article says, 97% of free users have less than 1000 pictures, and so won't see any difference. Your specific use-case would only be affected if the users you rely on happen to be mostly that 3%.
The question is what percentage of images, and quality ones, are those 3%.
Of course Flickr are going to find metrics that make this move sound low impact. But are these total accounts made up of mainly dead useless signups from over the years? If the 3% of users are of small significance, then I suspect Flicker wouldn't bother with this update.
> In 2013, Yahoo lost sight of what makes Flickr truly special and responded to a changing landscape in online photo sharing by giving every Flickr user a staggering terabyte of free storage
Well, that's one way to make the only remaining feature of your product sound like a bad thing...
Flickr's main feature is being a service that prioritizes photography as a portfolio, rather than photos as a visual social blogfeed. Limiting free users to 1,000 photos effectively kills the ability to use it as a clunkier Instagram. As long as there's enough revenue from ads and the pro accounts, this may be the best way forward for Flickr as a long-term service.
I've been a pro user for awhile. I guess the downside of this is that I now feel locked in, having well over 1,000 photos. I think previously, had I downgraded to the free version, I'd be able to keep all my photos but no longer provide them as full-size downloads. I don't have a particular complaint with Flickr as a service, it's just I don't do a lot of photography other than casual uploading to Instagram these days. That said, that Smugmug is committed to taking a different, coherent direction provides me with a lot more confidence than the years of Yahoo doing virtually nothing.
edit: maybe I'm grandfathered in for unlimited photos, if I were to downgrade to Free? The wording in the announcement is unclear.
It's still far more generous that what Vimeo is offering: 5GB total storage & 500MB uploads a _week_.
1000 photos can go a long way if used in the way Flickr was originally intended, which as you noted was a portfolio of sorts.
> edit: maybe I'm grandfathered in for unlimited photos, if I were to downgrade to Free? The wording in the announcement is unclear.
That's not how I'm reading it. It seems like it'll affect all Flickr users across the board.
> Flickr's main feature is being a service that prioritizes photography as a portfolio
I mean, that's what they want it to be now, but I don't feel like that's what it was under Yahoo...
It might have been intended that way originally (although I joined in 2005 and I don't remember this ever being a thing) but once they forced Yahoo!Photos into there, it pretty much just became a huge porn stash. Presumably once the 1000 photo limit kicks in, it'll be a much less huge porn stash.
Do you have more than 1000 photos that are portfolio level quality?
No, I probably have a 100 if even that. But the other ~9,900 are a nice archive of living in New York, and I get occasional requests from people (who can't find the buried download button) to use or copy a photo from some random street.
Importantly, they don't have to be portfolio level quality. Flickr is a fantastic place for photographers of all ability levels, and is especially great for those looking to learn & grow in their craft. All that's really required is a love of photography. If you care, we care.
I am quite happy about this. I have been a paying user for a long time, after verizon bought yahoo, I scrambled to figure out an alternative plan. Flickr was my sole backup after my laptop.
Summary, use flickr/smugmug to host and share pics that are curated (get rid of unwanted pics when uploading there). Use iCloud (paid), Google(free) and client side encrypted amazon drive to backup all pics (yes 3 backups and I do not trust amazon's free picture tier not sure what they will do with it, already bitten by them changing plans). Yes, I know Google gets what it wants ability to process my pics.. sigh.
I want to have an honest relation with my service providers, I pay them for a service they give me and I am their customer. Not going to reiterate what has been said numerous times about not being a customer if the service is free..
Flickr is giving up on "growth at all costs and monetize later" model to "we have a good quality focused service but you have to pay..". I would rather pay. The only problem I am now paying for both flickr and smugmug..
Thanks so much for being a customer and for the vote of confidence. We should figure out something for Flickr + SmugMug, pricing wise. Any ideas?
Business and pricing are not my areas of expertise, so feel free to ignore or improve on this idea. My suggestion is to use Flickr to upsell Portfolio and Pro SmugMug plans (maybe with a nominal discount of $1/mo for Portfolio and $2/mo for Pro). Flickr could be the place where photographers get feedback on their photos and improve their skills, and then SmugMug is where they build a more curated portfolio of photos to sell based on what resonates with people on Flickr. When a photographer has reached a tipping point of positive feedback on Flickr, they may feel ready to start selling their photos, and that's your opportunity to upsell an appropriate SmugMug plan.
Or if you're confident that you can identify photographers whose photos will sell based on engagement with their photos on Flickr, offer an introductory rate for the first year so they can test how well their photos sell. If they sell enough photos to cover the cost of an upgraded plan, paying for an ongoing plan is a no-brainer.
At least, that's my use case as a hobbyist. I currently pay for a basic SmugMug plan. I daydream of upgrading to a Portfolio plan to sell some photos (just for fun), but I don't know that I would manage to sell any. I'm now thinking Flickr might be a better place for me to start testing the water.
As an aside, thank you for removing the Yahoo login. That's been more of a barrier than you would expect for me every time I've wanted to use Flickr in the past. I don't use Yahoo for anything other than Flickr. I think I have more than one account, but I'm not sure, and I don't remember which account has my Flickr albums. It's just a mess. I'll definitely be giving Flickr another chance in January.
Thank you for the thoughtful and detailed feedback. Lots to think about.
And you're welcome on Yahoo login. Hard at work, but should be soon. Definitely want to let people access Flickr in whatever way they prefer.
The price is annoyance but not hurting me.. what is hurting me usability, both Flickr and Smugmug can do better to serve me. If anything fix flickr’s Social experience and Smugmugs upload and stats reporting, as a basic paid tier I have no insights if my url only sharing pics are widely used or not, seems like a cheap tax to force me to upgrade just to see the number of views
Using Google's free service as a photo backup seems like a poor choice, since they will scale them down.
Agreed! But it is still a backup, 1 out if 3.. I trust Google’s backup more than others in case of a geographic disaster..
I'm a fan of Flickr, and for me the community is the reason I upload my photos there. If this makes Flickr sustainable and lets the team invest in improving the product and fostering the community, I think it's a great move. Plus, seeing highly curated feeds is what people want, not just a dumping ground for every frame in your roll/SD card.
Yeah, same here. I was fairly active on it > 10 years ago but haven't really kept up with it since I got locked out of my original account once they switched to Yahoo. I can only imagine the amount of trash that would get uploaded with everyone getting essentially and unlimited amount of space. I always enjoyed the quality I could find there and it seems like they are trying to get back to that.
"First, and most crucially, the free terabyte largely attracted members who were drawn by the free storage, not by engagement with other lovers of photography. This caused a significant tonal shift in our platform, away from the community interaction and exploration of shared interests that makes Flickr the best shared home for photographers in the world."
I don't have a problem with their decision, and I'll certainly upgrade to pro in the next few weeks. But I also don't use Flickr for "community interaction and exploration of shared interests" - I just want to be able to create albums and put photos in them. So the storage was useful and the ostensible reason for the change (reversing the "tonal shift") doesn't entirely convince me.
But this isn't unexpected, and I think the purchase by SmugMug was a good thing. I just hope they can stop randomly losing my photos after this...
(Edit: s/convince/entirely convince/)
> So the storage was useful and the ostensible reason for the change (reversing the "tonal shift") doesn't convince me.
What are you not convinced about? They were pretty clear that people who use Flickr as a storage space rather than a photography community are not their target audience, and therefor will not be the focus of their efforts and goodwill.
> What are you not convinced about? They were pretty clear that people who use Flickr as a storage space rather than a photography community are not their target audience, and therefor will not be the focus of their efforts and goodwill.
I suspect that the change is more to do with the cost of storage than with re-creating some photographic community that may have existed before 2013. But I'm also happy to be proved wrong.
Yes, I am just using Flickr for storage. And while most of my albums are public, my photographic skills are fairly average compared to many on Flickr, so they are unlikely to be able to monetise my efforts. But I'm not interested in being part of a "photographic community" because, while I enjoy photography, I don't do it to be in a community. And I suspect that they see community participation as basically user-generated content creation, and I'm not into that either.
I'm happy to accept that I'm not a user they can support for free. I like Flickr, wish it well, and am happy to pay for pro.
> I suspect that the change is more to do with the cost of storage
I think you're right about that, but they did address it up front:
> Second, you can tell a lot about a product by how it makes money. Giving away vast amounts of storage creates data that can be sold to advertisers, with the inevitable result being that advertisers’ interests are prioritized over yours.
*
> I'm happy to accept that I'm not a user they can support for free. I like Flickr, wish it well, and am happy to pay for pro
That's great! And I want to say that I highly respect the maturity and understanding you demonstrate here. I wish more people adopted this attitude.
And we're happy to have you as Pro. Thanks! We have lots of customers who like to use Flickr for storage, and we're happy to have them. If you care about photography, for whatever reason, we care about you.
There are still plenty of options if you "just want to be able to create albums and put photos in them".
Facebook, Apple Photos, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Photos and Unsplash all do this, with varying trade-offs of cost, quality, and privacy.
Amazon is even free and unlimited...
>I just want to be able to create albums and put photos in them. So the storage was useful and the ostensible reason for the change (reversing the "tonal shift") doesn't convince me.
So, in other words... You're not the user they're trying to attract. That's exactly what they're saying.
Not quite. I am using their storage and I don't want to particiapte in a "community". The pictures in my albums don't bear much comparison with work that more able photgraphers than me can produce, but I'm selective about the pictures that I publish and spend time working on them in Lightroom. I'm not stuffing Flickr with cat photos like some social feed.
tldr is that I may not be the kind of user that they want or can support for free, but I think my use of the site is valid and I'm happy to pay to continue using it that way.
>I am using their storage and I don't want to particiapte in a "community".
Again, exactly the type of user they're trying to disuade from using their service...
I have a lot of pretty small pictures from a trail cam on Flickr so going only by number of pictures hurts me.
I really like this. I want to have an honest relationship with a service provider. I pay them for their service and they don't steal my data or reuse it in any way.
So I've had a Flickr for a while, and not just for the free terabyte - I just started using that about a year and a half ago. But it's now a pretty ingrained part of my life, particularly using the Flickr app pretty much like my photo gallery. I've got tens of thousands of photos there, and I've encouraged my friends to use it too because it's a great app, the uploading works fast and well, and it's better designed and easier to use than other photo apps in my opinion.
The rapid phase-out period unnerves me, personally. If I hadn't seen it, and bam, all but 1000 of my tens of thousands of photos were deleted, I don't know what I'd do. Yes, I know, have backups - but moving and organizing tens of thousands of photos takes time and energy. I've also got miscellaneous friends and family that I now have to tell about this change, to download their photos and keep them somewhere else.
I just wish there was a cheaper option for those of us who want to keep our photos on Flickr. $50/year is pretty high; you can get a 1TB hard drive for $38 on Amazon. If there was some kind of intermediate tier I'd really appreciate it.
I know that you want to increase community engagement, and I think that's a noble goal, but consider this: you've got a great photo tool, and some people want to use it for their own personal photos without engaging in the community. In my experience, the uploadr works faster and better than Google Photos or other apps I've tried, and I prefer the interface to other apps. Why not just charge what it costs to run? According to Backblaze [0] disk space now costs them about 2 cents/gigabyte. So about $20 for a terabyte. Now I realize there are costs associated of course - bandwidth etc, maintenance, whatnot - but I'm sure you could profitably offer a limited plan for less than what the current Pro plan costs.
In any case, good luck with Flickr, I'm rooting for you guys.
Regarding pricing: you rate $50/year as pretty high in comparison to a USB backup drive. I think a better comparison might be to other cloud storage services.
Quick survey of cloud storage pricing:
Dropbox personal 1TB: $120 / TB / year
Google "One" 2TB: $100 / TB / year
Microsoft OneDrive 1TB: $ 70 / TB / year
Apple iCloud 2TB: $ 60 / TB / year ($120/year)
Flickr "unlimited": $ 50 / year
So, I think Flickr pricing seems in-line (and significantly cheaper than Dropbox.) Of course it depends a bit on what unlimited really means in practice.
I'm an active free user with over 10000 photos. Not had intention yet to upgrade to pro. It's simply more cheaper to buy two-three external hdd-s for multiple backups than paying annually for a backup service.
I somewhat expected this decision, because 1TB free storage sounds to good to be true from the very beginning. I know, I will loose all my edited photos, geotags, edited descriptions and all my additions on flickr. I've uploaded publicly thousands with them of points of interest and with free to use licence, but seems that there is nothing to do. All the photos will remain buried in a forgotten hdd, somewhere in the bottom of a case.
I'm all for these changes and went to go sign up for Pro (was since Flickr started until about 2 years ago)
But, .... it seems like they're jumping the gun here. I went to go resign up for Pro but you still have to do it through your Yahoo account!!!
I don't want yahoo even associated with my flickr account but I could find no way to disassociate the yahoo account.
Shouldn't they fix that before rolling out this change?
(or maybe I missed how)
$50 annually just to store and share photos is a bit too much for my use case. Half of that would definitely justify it. But I am a very light user.
But other than that I am 100% on-board with this strategy. Get done with the "free" accounts already.
Haven't bother to go through the T&C but I hope they have clause that say they are not allowed to use your data for data-mining/advertising.
This was my thought exactly. There are hundreds of services out there that make your life just a little better or easier, and I can't afford them all. $50 just isn't worth it.
I think there's a strong case for creating an intermediate tier. $10 a year for 10k photos, but none of the other pro perks would be a pretty fair offer, I think. I'd sign up (well, not right away... I don't and won't have a Flickr account until I don't need a Yahoo address to get one.)
As a hobbyist photographer 1000 photographs is not a whole lot and I can't justify a pro account when I mostly just use it for storing my edited photos. A terabyte on the other hand is too much to give away to free users.
Then again, from a business standpoint I welcome the decision. I'd rather have a free place to host a 1000 photos than no Flickr at all. I welcome their stance alleged stance of treating users as priority rather than as just advertisement data generators.
I say alleged because I don't know how well these promises of users first are applied in practice but I'm hopeful.
At least they are upfront about it so kudos to Flickr for that.
I guess I won't have any option but to pay for Pro but I wish they had am intermediate tier that just gives expanded storage.
I have no interest in their Pro Statistics or the list of 'partner discounts' they bundle into Pro. Nor the ability to upload 10 minute videos.
Strip out that crap and just sell a Flickr Subscriber account for less money, please.
> As a hobbyist photographer 1000 photographs is not a whole lot and I can't justify a pro account
Perhaps you're an exception, but I'd bet good money that 90+% of the people saying this easily spend more than $50 per annum on gear and software.
I have to admit around the time they went to 1TB free, I stopped taking serious pictures and just used Flickr to be the default backup for my phone camera.
Now whe I go to Flickr I see a lot more photo plagiarism by throwaway accounts, to say nothing of dank memes.
If Flickr offers better integration of their photo storage with blogging platforms and the like, it would be very well worth the Pro account. And by concentrating on helping peopel who gather photos for public presentation, they'd be offering a service that isn't quite like the shutterbug demographic they want, but is still on the same tenor.
Personally I have put on Flickr thousands of photos from my seven years of travels in Asia which are very dear to me. And suddenly I had been given a month's notice to leave or pay.
I had sympathy for Flickr as community like 8-10 years ago but haven't been using actively Flickr for couple of years - as it became slowly unusable. I had to write my own scripts to import all my photos as their tools stooped being developed 10 years ago. [1]
At the moment Flickr webpage is quite unusable (if you block aggressive tracking from Yahoo and other 3-rd parties on DNS level), Flickr app is unusable for privacy reasons - installation on Android requires access to identity, contacts and microphone) and logging to Flickr requires giving some weird permissions to Oath (whoever it is).
So with all the sympathy for the new owners of Flickr I think it is a bit premature to ask loyal users for ransom before putting it's house in order and showing what the new Flickr would be. It is just asking me to pay for the development in unknown direction.
I got the message and I will not be using their services in the future as they cannot be considered by me as serious and trusted.
5$ per month on a monthly plan.
Sry but that is not 'ransom'.
And srsly you used it and never paid? Do you think they want you?
I commend the Flickr team for making this move. It takes courage to make this kind of change, when you know you'll take some flak for it (e.g. this very HN thread). At the end of the day, you'll piss off some people, but you know that the decision makes sense and you forge ahead.
Thank you! (Disclaimer: Blog author, CEO & Chief Geek here). I clearly believe, deeply, that focusing on photographers who care about photography is the right path forward, and I'm excited to see others feel that way, too. Please feel free to ask any questions I might be able to answer, and thanks again.
I just want to express my gratitude for finally, fully embracing wider gamuts. I've been eagerly awaiting this day (and have a group all set up to show them off - https://www.flickr.com/groups/2234658@N22/).
Questions:
1. To the extent reprocessing is necessary, will that be done automatically (e.g. as it is for photos originally uploaded at full resolution, and now being displayed at 5K)?
2. Do all mobile OSs provide the color profile management necessary for the app to properly display photos? I know this was a challenge in the past.
3. Will there be any indication a photo is outside of sRGB, aside from EXIF?
P.S. - I'm sure you're aware, but there's a (closed) group of alpha/beta users (https://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrbeta/) always eager to help provide feedback.
1. Should be automatic. Still testing, but looking fantastic so far.
2. The coverage across modern OSes, browsers, and devices is incredibly high, and increasing daily, or we wouldn't be finally pulling the trigger. (I've wanted to do this for 16 years!)
3. Hmm, hadn't thought about this. What did you have in mind?
That's all great to here. I was thinking that the color space could be listed within the little section below the photo summarizing the EXIF data (with little pictorials for aperture, lens, shutter speed, flash, etc.). That would make it a lot easier to know if you're seeing a photo as intended.
Do you feel that three months is adequate warning to actively delete people's data? If they've entrusted their photos solely to you, they may not have any way to recover data that is incredibly unique... you can't just recreate a photo.
I definitely think it's enough time to cut off new upload for people over the limit, but you should strongly consider whether or not your storage costs are that high as to make it worth it to not give a longer runway for people to export.
Is there any discussion about making it easy to sell prints? I'm an amateur photographer and have had several people inquire about prints, but I never know what to say because I have no idea how to make prints, nor do I have a lot of time. I know Yahoo had a WallArt program, but it seems to have failed, which is strange since it seems like most pro photographers sell prints.
Great feedback, thanks. This is a great secondary line of business for SmugMug already, so this is great to hear and we'll think about it. Thanks again.
If community == accounts with fewer photos, and revenue == people willing to pay for more photos, how does getting their revenue from the people who use Flickr in a way Flickr is trying to pivot from support furthering the goal of community?
I really like Flickr. There's a wealth of beautiful images, great groups (even though a lot of the ones I used are dead/dying), and I really like that I can upload uncompressed images. A lot of what this post says rings true, and hopefully they can right the ship on the engagement front, because right now it feels pretty dismal. When I post to Instagram, I get 20 times the engagement. I'm not sure how they fix that, but I'll stay on board as long as they keep trying to improve things. I'd have no problem going pro if I hit the 1000 image limit (right now I'm at 574).
Well-written product announcement! clear explanation of "bad news" for a lot of users, but encouraging for target customers. I hope when I grow up I too can write something like this. :)
@Onethumb: I have ~150k photos on Flickr and a 10 year paid account but I stopped using it ~1.5 years ago when I got sick of their video upload timestamp issues. I have not checked recently if fixed.
When I upload photos, Flickr looks at the taken date of the photo and sorts them that way. When I upload videos from the computer (using the upload tool), Flickr does NOT look at the metadata to set the taken date. Instead, then taken date is set to the current date meaning the videos are out of order of the photos.
Thank you so much for being a customer! I would love to help track this down and fix it, especially since I'm writing the new photo & video services. :) I will add this to my list.
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2018/10/31/putting-your-best-photo...
WIth the auto upload feature of flickr I can imagine people using flickr as their main photo storage/backup.
And if they happen to not pay attention to announcements like these they might find their photo's irreverably gone in a few months.
Moves like this, so soon after the acquisition, with 0 lenience for existing users makes me not trust Flickr/SmugSmug anymore. What will be the next step when they will randomly delete your photo's?
The $5 is OK but a month to decide is too short. Plus I would rather see what am I paying for before I decide. At the moment Flickr isn't much of use to me.
If I remember correctly, Flickr used to hide free user's over 200 photos and they'll show up one upgraded to pro. But now they'll delete exceeded photos.
I'm not going to complain about a company refocusing their profitability and adjusting things - good for them.
but i think this was horrible messaging. I would have much rather appreciated a more straightforward approach, instead of trying to get me to be excited for being limited to 1,000 images and video. I think it shows flickr still has a ways to go in building trust - because being disingenuous in messaging doesn't build it.
Flickr was probably the first service I paid money for. I seem to recall shelling out $5(?) a month years back - maybe around 2009, possibly earlier - when I hit the 200 photos limit. I was more than happy to pay that back then, because they were doing something I valued. It was a frictionless way to share photos, and the community was nice. I used to actively go and flick through people’s photos, spending a few minutes each day looking at beautiful photography. I’ve not even attempted to log in to Flickr in years. Yahoo made a royal mess of it - in particular when the Flickr ID had to be tied to a Yahoo ID, I just gave up even attempting to log in. Rubbish. Will I pay again? Probably not. The web has moved on and there are easier ways to share photos now. The communities that were once those little communities like Flickr, united by a common passion and desire to show something special have been poisoned by the meme-driven, glib-comment-ridden everything-in-one-place race to the bottom of bigger social networks. Flickr was the product of a gentler, more innocent time.
funny guys, so instead 1TB of space you are giving me now roughly 5GB on par with dozens of free cloud storages and you think for the money you ask for pro account i won't rather set up my own paid cloud where i have complete control over my content instead of some smugs?
flickr app it's absolutely horrible, impossible to organize or share photos which i would like to do, but it's pretty much impossible so i just used it as backup, so good luck with your business if you think you will turn those free users into paid with this strategy and i will keep my public photos there for people to see, just going to delete account (10yo+) and finally get rid of yahoo account (at last one benefit from this mess), because apparently photographer enough if i am not willing to pay for sharing few photos andyou think 1000 photos it's enough for years
and if someone is into real photography they are already long time on 500px, so once again who needs paid flickr? might as well shut it down instead of this slow death and blackmailing users who dunno any better how to transfer photos and set their own cloud
I wonder how many people even use their Yahoo accounts any more. This thread was the first that I heard about flickr changing T&Cs. I don't ever log in, I just have some scripts that add particular photos to my photostream -- I.m up to 1,700 now. These then get shown on particular web pages on a web site that I run.
I'll probably end up paying for a couple of months of Pro before deleting everything (as it'll take some time to migrate onto another service).
What frustrates me is that this is the second service that I use that changed it's T&Cs on me this year which needed a lot of work to redo my websites (the other was Google Maps which went from free to $2k/month).
Flickr needs to make money, but I'll bet the fallout will be bad as this change affects a bunch of users who have no idea that it is coming. Presumably the 3% of free people with more than 1k photos are causing significant costs and Flickr wants to dump them.
It took me awhile to figure out my old Yahoo login for Flickr. But I finally found it! (had to dig way back into my gmail archives). I definitely will be switching my login when that is rolled out.
As a paid SmugMug user, is there is discount for signing up for a paid flickr account? I saw that there is a discount to become a SmugMug user listed on Flickr Pro Perks.
Hope they'll be contacting archive.org before deleting those pictures of the free users with more than 1000 photos.
I think this is a positive step forward, actively planning to keep the service sustainable is a solid game plan.
Having more than 1000 pix means I'm now a pro member again, which I let lapse when storage went to 1 ter. Though, my ~38,000 pics only take up 5% of that terabyte. Some of those 2004 pictures are really tiny. Photography may not be as much of a focus for me now, but those early days were really engaging, here's hoping SM brings some of the magic back.
Having lots of pictures, and albums has made sorting, managing them much harder with the Organize browser tool. I'm interested how Smugmug will be improving the experience of managing photos and albums.
Will Organize be getting some of the new direction focus?
As someone with way more than 1000 photos on Flickr, I hope they provide an easy way to export the photos and metadata out.
I mostly agree with the direction they want to take, I just don't want to be part of the journey and so want to get my photos out.
The landing page for the announcement has a little more detail: https://www.flickr.com/lookingahead/
> Free members with more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded to Flickr have until Tuesday, January 8, 2019, to upgrade to Pro or download content over the limit. After January 8, 2019, members over the limit will no longer be able to upload new photos to Flickr. After February 5, 2019, free accounts that contain over 1,000 photos or videos will have content actively deleted -- starting from oldest to newest date uploaded -- to meet the new limit.
I have a Pro account so maybe it's different, but I have a "Request my Flickr data" button in the bottom right of my account page: https://www.flickr.com/account
And unless something has changed recently, IIRC, Flickr had a very generous and fairly easy to use JSON API. In the past I've been able to bulk download my ~10,000 photos with just a few calls: https://idratherbewriting.com/learnapidoc/docapis_flickr_exa...
Surprisingly enough, they have a data export on the account page. I'm not sure when this was added but it was always a pain point for me and a reason I stopped paying any attention to my Flickr account. All it took was a drastic change to make me re-check my account!
In the time it took to write this comment you could've logged in and spotted the big "Export my data" button right there on the Account Settings page...
Does it include the metadata too?
It's actually a good idea. It forces the user to do some curating of their images, encouraging them to only put their best images online. Which in turn should result in more browsers engaging with the site and photographer.
I am fine with going to Flickr Pro but this is also in the price range of a regular SmugMug account. Does anybody know how to decide between the two?
Also: this is is not the only criteria, but do any of them allow a custom domain?
Yeah, one of things I've been curious to see is how the two services are going to slot together.
Long term Flickr Pro user (signed up 2007) and when my Pro sub expires a year from now there's some compelling reasons to dump Flickr and migrate to SmugMug - not least that SM's had literally anything done with it in the last few years, while Flickr's just got clunkier and clunkier (but also that there's a bunch of old, not-good, photos that I don't really care about on there).
The quality of the "community" on both Flickr and 500px makes the de-prioritisation of the same on SmugMug an advantage too - there's way too much spam on Flickr, although even that's dropped off over the last few years.
Smugmug allows custom domains, including support for https. It also allows for custom branding and layout design (your name here, powered by Smugmug).
I wasn't able to get a bare domain (e.g. domainname.tld) to work directly, so i set up a redirect to www.domainname.tld from there and it's been good for me. I don't know if that has changed since I set it up.
I can't speak for SmugMug specifically, but generally the reason you can't use bare domains to point to hosted services is that the hosted services want you to use a CNAME record so they can cycle in/out IP addresses at will. CNAME records aren't allowed on bare domains.
Custom domains only seem to be available from the "Power" plan upwards as as I can tell.
Besides custom domain: what are the pros/cons of Flickr vs SmugMug?
I guess it depends on your use case. I'm interested in having my own gallery I can share, rather than a Flickr page. I prefer "my photo gallery site" to "my pictures on Flickr", so for me the custom domain and branding is important. I don't particularly care about the community aspects beyond viewing the photos of some of my friends, so that piece of Flickr holds little interest to me. Of course when I set it up I was also very disillusioned about Yahoo and wanted to get away from that and into something that felt more sustainable.
SmugMug allows a custom domain. I'd argue that it's more private / less community oriented than SmugMug. Depends on what you want I guess; I've read about many people using 500px to upload some of their best shots as a portfolio & using smugmug for the rest.
"Depends on what you want I guess; I've read about many people using 500px to upload some of their best shots as a portfolio & using smugmug for the rest."
That's what I do. Until now Flickr was my storage for all pictures and 500px only for my best.
I love everything about this announcement.
I've been a Flickr Pro user for ages. Flickr was one of the things that got me into photography and improved my skills. I learned how to take better pictures by looking at other photos and seeing what kind of feedback mine got.
Then Yahoo aquired it and Flickr just fizzled out. I kept taking pictures but it wasn't the same without a community to share them with. It really made me sad.
I truly hope Flickr can return to the fantastic site it used to be and everything about this announcement reads like they have their head on straight.
> you can tell a lot about a product by how it makes money. Giving away vast amounts of storage creates data that can be sold to advertisers, with the inevitable result being that advertisers’ interests are prioritized over yours. Reducing the free storage offering ensures that we run Flickr on subscriptions, which guarantees that our focus is always on how to make your experience better.
If one thing were to make me want to consider Flickr's services, this statement alone would be it.
Paying customer for years. I got 7000 photos up there -- memories of the best times of my life. Extremely worthwhile service. All these folks talking about "death knell" should maybe think about paying for it if the feelings are so strong. They must really value what is on offer, and how about showing appreciation for what is valuable in your life?
I wonder if the comment about "selling our users" is a swipe at Yahoo!, Google (https://www.google.com/photos/about/), or both.
Does anyone have data on how Google Photos generates revenue? Is it just a mechanism to upsell Google Drive storage quotas? Or are they also mining the photo meta data?
"The information gleaned from analyzing these photos does not travel outside of this product — not today. But if I thought we could return immense value to the users based on this data I'm sure we would consider doing that. For instance, if it were possible for Google Photos to figure out that I have a Tesla, and Tesla wanted to alert me to a recall, that would be a service that we would consider offering, with appropriate controls and disclosure to the user."
-- Bradley Horowitz, Google VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing (2015)
So yes, using info from the photos is definitively on the table. But I doubt they made Photos with a specific income stream in mind; they want to know everything about everything and everyone. The possibilities (for monetization and much more) are tremendously higher when you can leverage the connections between datasets, even if they are kinda lame by themselves.
"if it were possible for Google Photos to figure out that I have a Tesla, and Tesla wanted to alert me to a recall, that would be a service that we would consider offering"
That sounds terrible. He attempts to soften it by using an example that seems very important/critical (a vehicle "recall") instead of saying something like "If Google Photos can tell you like Starbucks and Startbucks wanted to show ads to you, that would be a service that we would consider offering"
As much as I’m bummed about this, I do have to admit I’m getting what I paid for. I’m currently anaazon prime member so I’ll probably migrate to that solution for added photo backup.
Pre-2013 Flickr was a really fun place and I want to go back to there. So I love the initiative and direction here.
However, I lost the thread of the argument at the penultimate paragraph. If the “vast majority” of current free users will still qualify, why will this change the community in a significant way?
The users in the free tier are now given a hard ceiling of 1,000 photos, so it would seemingly dampen their future ambitions to use Flickr as a social stream or bulk archive.
I get that, but apparently they weren’t hitting that limit anyway. So is this a purely psychological tactic? That’s fascinating...kind of leveraging the psychology of an “unlimited” cellular plan but in reverse.
It might be psychological on Flickr's end too, as developers no longer have to propose new features that have the requirement of scaling with a high-resource-consuming free tier.
But that's my point — how is the resource consumption changing if hardly anybody is kicked out? Is there a tiny number of people storing a terabyte of photos each? But if the number of people is tiny, how can that be affecting the community feeling?
Those few people who store petabytes of videos was enough for even Amazon to boot them off their storage product.
Well honestly, any service for which one derives value from should have a monetary value for one. $49.99 per year, or about $4 per month is about the cost of 2 cups of coffee. Totally reasonable if you ask me.
$4 is more than 16 cups of coffee here. Would you pay $32 a month for the service?
Well carry-out coffee is overpriced so I don't know if that's a useful comparison.
Is Flickr worth 1.5x my monthly ISP cost? That's a trickier calculation.
Plus Flickr only bill in USD so my bank will charge a foreign-transaction fee too.
Is there a way to download all of my photos? I have 25k in a bunch of albums, and it seems like albums over 5k photos in size they wont zip up to download...wtf? Come on Flickr.
I'm glad I got grandfathered in with my UNLIMITED storage. Wondering when it's going to end ;)
Is it still a grandfathering policy? This says that paying professional accounts get unlimited storage:
https://www.flickr.com/lookingahead/?utm_campaign=flickr-loo...
Whoosh.
Ah, but my pro account is for free, forever :)
Goodbye Flickr. :(
Raise your hand if you use Flickr today. :-)
Tl:dr: storage is expensive, and we aren't going to be giving it away when you're not giving us enough revenue
I think this is a bit unkind.
Maybe: Storage is expensive, and we'd rather collect money from you, rather than sell you to advertisers.
I think you nailed the marketing of this change. Though, if Flickr posted the steps/goals to making the user a "priority" rather than a "product," I would be more convinced. A cursory read of their TOS doesn't indicate any changes (though this may be premature as the changes are not in effect), and their (1)non-blog upgrade post doesn't seem to indicate any changes in data collection/selling.
As an aside, if you were looking to subscribe to their Pro product, the link in the blog post contains a coupon for $15 off their yearly subscription.
Are we sure they still won't sell you to advertisers in addition to subscription fees?
I promise this won't happen. I hate customer-hostile business models. (Disclaimer: Blog author, CEO & Chief Geek here)
your own cloud will cost you less and it will be much safer privacy wise until these smugs change their ToS again and throw you over deck
Well, yes. This is the internet growing up.
Servers cost money. People making the software and running the servers cost money. Previously those costs were hidden from end-users, usually by advertising-based business models. Now that consumers aren't putting up with that as much, smart companies are doing the old-fashioned thing of charging people for the valuable services they provide, instead of selling off human attention to advertisers. On the whole, this kind of stuff is better for everyone.
A bit harsh, but... yeah, companies need to make money, and it seems like flickr is going about that in the right way here.
Wow, Flickr is still around
Flickr's stupid front end is what turned me off from them in the beginning. I built my own sites and hosted my own photos because it was cheap and easy.
And that's why you don't use (free) cloud services as your only backup. I thought about storing all my family photos on flicker a few years ago... Would have been useless now.
Well your use case is exactly what they said that they didn't want.
That might be, but I couldn't have known a few years ago. It was just a free photo hoster back then.
Now I would be "forced" to pay, which in itself wouldn't be all too bad I guess.
I did that and I am happy about this announcement b/c I had lost faith in Yahoo a while ago and Verizon deal sealed it for me. I have over 80K pics there and no easy way for me to delete them, now they will do it for me.
Flickr is under new ownership (mine). We would love the opportunity to keep your 80K photos safe and let you share them with those you care about most. Please let me know if there's something we can do to help with this.
Flickr is no longer owned by Verizon or the remnants of Yahoo.
I do store all my family fotos on Flickr. I just pay for a pro account.
Thank you! You rock and we love you. :)
You just said, don't use a free service to back up. They said, "okay, it's not free" which is exactly what you just said was the right thing to do.
> I thought about storing all my family photos on flicker a few years ago... Would have been useless now.
No, it would have been exactly as you just said. You'd start paying and your backup would still be there.