Flickr to begin deleting images over the 1K limit starting tomorrow for free accounts

"they" that gave you 1tb was yahoo.

After running flickr into the ground "they" gave up.

"they" now is a different company trying to make flickr relevant again.

I'm willing to give them a shot at so they can "Make Flickr Great Again"

They already have Smug Mug.
Next step is running Flickr into the ground, but this time for real and assimilating all the Flickr users for Smug Mug (I never got the purpose of it, Flickr was perfect.)

So don’t pay and don’t use the service.

Hardware, electricity, leased line costs and manpower to look after the server farm - it's patently wrong to say they're charging for nothing. You may not agree with the cost and that's fine but you're wrong when you say it's "nothing"

I'd also use empirical evidence that the previous model wasn't sustainable by the fact that Yahoo and then Oath sold off their assets and SmugMug bought Flickr.

I didn’t say every company.

Yahoo shares were in freefall and actively looking for someone to buy them. Indeed iirc their original valuation was rejected ie they weren’t worth the money.
So in this particular case I think I can use it as evidence that their business model for Flickr was unsustainable.

@P10004K
So why sign up for Flickr? Just look at them on your own computer.

On a family trip to Australia I took around 640 photos in two weeks. Except for family interest shots, only a couple dozen were good enough to upload to anywhere for any reason.

Are you kidding ? I have 15,430 images in my Flickr account that I can access them from any internet device like my 12.9" iPad Pro with 512GB and LTE.

So you'll be paying the $50?

Obviously depends on one's needs whether 1000 will be enough. I'm talking about compared to similar services 1000 is weeeeeak... Pitiful actually.

Its possible Comcast has some filtering rules that are blocking that emails from Yahoo servers. Also and I've done this are you hitting the Blue "Yes, send me a verification code" button? :) When you do that it send you to second page to enter the code.

It took all day to figure this out, but...

...the Flickr phone app (Android) is, apparently, always connected to my Flickr account. I clicked on the person-in-the-circle icon to bring up my home page. I clicked on the 3 stacked dots in the upper right. That brought up Settings. Hidden waaay down at the bottom of the page [oh, I have to SCROLLLL! Why didn't I figure that out this morning? Head slap...] is Manage Accounts. In Manage Accounts, I was able to set up getting a verification code sent to my cell phone instead of my back up email account. And That Fixed The Problem. I immediately went to my PC & was able to log in to Flickr's web site after entering in a verification code sent to my phone.

Happy you figured it out!

That is an interesting point, Ron. On a number of occasions here at DPR, I've been essentially told that I'm odd for not wanting the most resolution possible out of my cameras -- 'memory / storage is cheap!' they say.

Well, I'm thinking long term.. your photo collection is accumulating perpetually over time. Like a giant Katamari ball. It never shrinks, always grows.

With this in mind, if I only need 16 or 24MP images and not 36 or 47 or 100MP for my work then that is a much smaller footprint I'm maintaining over 20 or 30 or 40 years from now.

Ok, I can't easily produce sharp wall-sized prints. That's fine. My work, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say many or most people's work, doesn't ever have those kind of requirements in reality. Sometimes less is more.

@Nikon1977k - What's short sided and childish is thinking mankind can continue to pollute this earth without consequence. But hey, what do you care, you won't be alive in 25 years to deal with the mess your generation left behind. I'm guessing you're probably a Trump supporter too...

Nikon...

Do you actually think that using all that oil is doing us any favours??

I doubt any of you either side of this debate are going to have your minds changed -- so what is the point of arguing it so fervently?

Nikon1977
OP did not say we are running out of energy, were at peak oil. He said that data storage is expensive and energy consuming.
Rant elsewhere.

What's wrong with "being a good internet citizen" simply because it's the right thing to do...with no reward other than personal satisfaction?

I don't share your pessimism. If more people did the right thing, when no one's looking, this would be a better world. Positive actions do rub off -no woo necessary.

Mfinley. Greater good wrong term, we speak of doing the greater good at the expense of something. This is not the case here. He is doing something, individually, of very small benefit but which collectively is of great benefit.

Notably the psychological effect of doing something positively motivated is perhaps more significant , though less quantifiable. Extrapolate as you wish.

I love how you’re chastising Flickr for being cheap yet you’re not willing to stump up money yourself

I have been on Flickr for a number of years, and view the current changes to be illogical, whilst I appreciate that data storage costs money, 2gb isn’t overkill when I was allowed 1tb originally, its the illogicality of 1000 images versus data storage that is annoying

Is it worth it for me to stump up the money, no not in my view for the usage I had or now have, so account will go dormant

Don’t care if they make a mess of it going forward either

@Special Circumstances, you misunderstand social media. We are not customers, we are the labor and the product. We provide free labor and content to Flickr (or worse than free, those Pro users who pay Flickr to work for them for free).

Blackmail: /ˈblakmeɪl/

noun

the action, treated as a criminal offence, of demanding payment or another benefit from someone in return for not revealing compromising or damaging information about them.

Sorry but how is this blackmail exactly? They've given ample warning to their existing users about the change. Besides which, if you only had your photos stored on Flickr, then I don't believe for a second that you actually cared about them. Yes, Flickr could have said "ok, anyone who loaded several hundreds of GBs of pics before we were bought, yeah, you can keep your stuff even with a free account", but used space is used space and it has costs, no matter how you see it.
And considering how many cheapskates resided on Flickr, what do you think would have happened if they'd said "yep, existing users can keep all their stuff for free"?

Heck, I don't much like Flickr, I don't even use it, but calling this a blackmail is frankly odd, to put it kindly.

@Lars Rehm: Agree; this is bait and switch if not actually blackmail. I had around 3500 photos. I actually ended up deleting some of the most recent ones since the older ones would be harder to locate on my personal computer. Just left very sour taste in my mouth. The lesson for me is to never trust an online service again, paid or not.

My biggest gripe is the 100% price increase for paid account. This has made me somewhat resentful. Yes, I am paying it. but, I could have paid a smaller increase with a smile on my face, rather than a loss of Goodwill.

@kurgo of course I have my images not only stored on flickr. I haven't uploaded any in a long time actually. However, on the ones I did upload a long time ago (when I was Pro user) I spent a lot of time tagging and organizing them on Flickr. I still have the pictures of course but the time I spent on organizing them in flickr is lost. Even if I'd still use Flickr at this point I'd probably stop doing it now, simply because you can't trust a company who does this sort of thing. Maybe next year they'll feel like increasing the Pro rate to $500 just because they can...

@ Arun H how is it bait and switch? Flickr was sold to another company. Bait and Switch would be if it was the same company. Yahoo and by association Flickr were losing money and the assets needed to be sold. Flickr/Smug Mug aren’t a charity or a government run organisation, it needs to make money to survive. You can either go the “free” route where you’re the product ie your information is used/sold ala Facebook and Google or you can pay for something where there’s less likelihood of that happen do there’s more accountability for the company in their bottom line.

@Lars Rehm "Existing users should not lose any images."
Lars, did you even read what Damien Demolder wrote in this short article before commenting? Flickr changed hands, previous owner (Yahoo) offered unlimited free space and was bleeding money, new owner (SmugMug) had to limit free space to make the site financially viable. Would you rather see it go bankrupt?
Following your logic, Google should keep their Google+ social network forever, even though it turned out to be a business failure. After all, people who used the site will see ALL of their uploads erased.

@Kurgo
According to https://www.dictionary.com/browse/blackmail and to https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/blackmail
Lars Rehm's usage of term "blackmail" is totally correct.

@ G W
It's totally incorrect. Where's the extortion part, may I ask? The "blackmail" accusation is silly and rude. It's as if you were provided a free parking space for a number of years, then the new owner of the lot says "Listen, you may still park here all week if you pay a moderate fee. If you don't want to pay, please don't occupy this space on Mondays and Wednesdays, other days are still fine." Would you then accuse the man of blackmail? Because that's what you (and Lars Rehm) suggest.

While I understand the frustration of people who got used to the Yahoo offer of unlimited storage, I'd primarily target my anger at Yahoo, which never worked out what to do with Flickr, did little development work and undermined the existing community by turning into a cheap/free storage service.

That business model failed and now SmugMug is trying to re-establish it as a standalone business, rather than as a loss-leader for whatever else it was Yahoo thought it did.

SmugMug seems to want to turn it back into the thing it once was (that moment may have passed, I guess we'll see), and it looks like they've tried to find a way to reduce their storage commitments in a way that minimizes the impact to the majority of people. That's really harsh for the people who are affected, but probably inevitable once Yahoo got bought.

Realistically, if SmugMug hadn't bought Flickr, it might have been closed and everyone would lose everything. Is that SmugMug's fault or Yahoo's?

Lars "simply because you can't trust a company who does this sort of thing" Well, your first mistake was trusting a service by Yahoo. Second mistake is equating Yahoo and Smugmug or whomever else would buy and continue the site, they're not the same company. Third mistake is to expect free things to last forever. Even Microsoft had to dial down their unlimited cloud storage to great disappointment of their users.

And the sentiments about cost going up. Well, okay, but consider that you are not only paying for online storage of your photos but also paying people who maintain it 24/7, now also provide better support and are genuinely interested to continue the service with profitable plan. That's worth something, isn't it? And the people deserve to have their wages increase compared to many years ago.

We as people expect cheap things to buy but then wonder why nobody wants to buy our $50, $100, $200 and more prints, because they of course don't cost so much to make, right?

Not especially fair when the free limit was specifically announced as a trade-off for the advent of paid advertising.

If they're going this path then fair would be giving a cut of the advertising revenue to users based on the number of views similar to other platforms such as Youtube.

for some people its a lot of money. these people dont got get a latte at a coffee shop.
i remember saving 2 years for a laptop so i could use it for work when i was 20. 50 was a big chunk of change at the time.

So poor people suppose to get stuff for free? You're allowed 1000 photos, that a a lot for free.

Hosting a thousand photos for the cost of $0.00 is generous enough.
I have no doubt that a talented photographer might take more than a thousand good photos over a period of several years. But that doesn't mean they need to be archived for all eternity on someone else's service. Switch them out once in a while, replace the old with the new, change themes occasionally, something!

If you are using Flicker as a place to show your work then I think 1000 photos is more than adequate. If you are using it as a form of image backup then I don't think $50/year is too much to ask.

"It's the cost of a latte a month."

Only problem is my netflicks is a latte a month, my webhost is a latte a month, my hulu is a latte a month, my alexa home security is a latte a month, my home alarm is a latte a month, my feed the children subscription is a latte a month, my lightroom subscription is a latte a month... Yea flicker is a latte a month, but it's one of 200 lattes a month that I'm being latte a month to death over.

@mfinley

So you're saying everyone should give you their service for free because you don't want to pay for some many services? Who is forcing you to use 200 services?

@mfinley
No one is forcing you to use those services though. Also, Flickr offers to host 1000 photos for you, for free. I think that’s very generous. Would you allow me to host 1000 of my images on your computer for free?

Dumb comments, it's not about forcing anyone, its about the dumb salesman trick 101 - "It's only a coffee a day". This is why Americans have no savings, why federal workers of all people (with on average 20% higher salaries than the average earner in this country) live paycheck to paycheck, because EVERY penny gets spent every paycheck one latte at a time, one more latte a day for whatever shiney thing you think you just have to buy at a small price that bleeds you out as the death by 1000 cuts. It's only a latte a day... so is this, so this and this and this... pretty soon it all adds up. That's what the reply was about not being forced or not to use flicker or anything else. Shouldn't have to spell it out but for some, especially if you fall for the "just a latte a day" you have to have it spelled out

You got to be special to believe that a free service will be free for ever and ever and ever.

@mfinley “Only problem is my netflicks is a latte a month, my webhost is a latte a month, my hulu is a latte a month, my alexa home security is a latte a month, my home alarm is a latte a month, my feed the children subscription is a latte a month, my lightroom subscription is a latte a month... Yea flicker is a latte a month, but it's one of 200 lattes a month that I'm being latte a month to death over.”

Oh woe unto me and my 1st world problems.
I assume you’re an adult with a modicum of decision making capability? Prioritise which services you “need” and if they’re worth whatever price asking, it really is that simple.

BTW in reply to your latte analogy, no ones forcing you to buy the latte...