The great flickr lock-out looms

I’ve been away from the “real” internet for the past week (and it feels good), no junk email or time wasting distractions (yes that’s you YouTube). I wasn’t totally off-line because I had my mobile phone, which of cause has several apps that access the internet (eg Instgram and Flickr, both of which I did use).

Somehow this meant that I missed the rescheduling of the date flickr would start locking out uploads to free account users with more than 1000 photos. I currently have 4,384 so I will have to delete 3,500 photo in the next couple of days and I don’t think that’s going to happen. I have more important things to do right now.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just spend the AUD$84 each year to avoid this hassle?

Well No. I’ve always had a free account and that allowed me to interact with other photographers and special interest groups. I have never really wanted to use flickr as a photo backup or archiving facility. True flickr has several good organizational features and I did use it for a while as a way to share photos into my blog. Yet to me it is the community aspects of flickr that make it worthwhile. Sadly spending money on the PRO account really doesn’t enhance that community at all.

Also important I’m retired and thus have a very fixed and probably diminishing cashflow so I need to avoid  unnecessary commitments  to ongoing costs. Finally I’d rather have fun taking photos and I’m happy to reduce my on-line photos to less than 1000, you never know it might increase the quality of the collection. I’m really not complaining I’ll wear it I just don’t want to fret over extra expenditure.