The Sting in the Tail for Free Flickr Accounts

Despite the rhetoric from Don MacAskill and others when SmugMug bought Flickr from Oath, today they announce a couple of big changes. Suggesting “This newly-independent community can shape the future of Photography itself”, whatever that means. The cost  of the Pro Account remains the same USD$50, with the same basic features (Ad-free,Unlimited Storage & More Detailed Stats). Its actually it’s still comparable with Smug Mug’s Basic account USD$3.99 (~USD48 annually). There are a couple more things offered like a 50% discount on a smug mug Portfolio, and promise of increased resolution and expanded Colour space, and 10min video rather than 5mins The various and proposed offerings for Pro (paid) membership do offer various advantages compared with the free account but not enough to excite me. At the moment I’m not likely to commit to an ongoing fee for the service, as I’m retired, I have to carefully mange my cashflows and I’m not wishing to use flickr as cloud backup/storage.

The sting in the tail is the proposed changes for the free accounts, and I am a long time free account members. From February next year free accounts (currently unlimited number up to 1TB disk space, but you get ads) will be limited to 1,000 photos. 1000 photos at even one a day is over 3 years worth of posts.  C’est La vie.

I lived with Yahoos limit of 200 photos for free accounts for several years. That was you could only see the last 200 of your photos, However if you posted your photos to groups or had “official” links your photo could still be displayed (in other words the photo still existed on the platform). From what I understand the new limit will be enacted differently. Once you reach the 1000 limit you will be blocked from uploading. Also, and more significantly, if you have more than 1000 images stored Flickr will deleted the excess starting with the oldest! They will be gone forever from flickr. I expect this to be very unpopular, and lead to some ill informed rants. So get ready for the social media backlash! Not sure if deleting old photo once I reach the limit will free up space to  let me add new ones (I can’t currently find any specific reference to this).

I’m hopeful I will be able to remain using Flickr as a place to show my recent photos, but with a bit of extra work on my behalf (ie deleting other photos to give me space). Which in theory gives me the opportunity to curate my collection and improve the quality.

So the ride could get a little bumpy but I’m prepared to hang in there.

UPDATE Don MacAskil has posted on the flickr blog a fairly detail explanation of why free flickr accounts will be limited and the background behind the choice of the 1000 photo limit. Aslo of interest there is a well reasoned article by Thomas Hawk on PetaPixel on Why Flickr limiting free users to 1000 photos is a smart move.