Flickr recently announced some changes to their free account offering, in a blog post Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts Flickr announced “Beginning January 8, 2019, Free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos and videos. If you need unlimited storage, you’ll need to upgrade to Flickr Pro.”
If you have a free account on Flickr and have more than 1,000 images, Flickr will start deleting them for you in February until you are down to the new limit.
The Flickr blog post also states something that is a tad misleading “It’s also more closely aligned to Flickr’s past (before 2013, Free members were limited to 200 photos), and we liked the idea of returning to our roots but with free space for five times as many photos as before”.
This isn’t strictly accurate, whereas only 200 images would appear in your photostream, you were not restricted to 200 images, the images were not deleted, they could stlll exist in groups or remain embedded on blogs and forums and if you upgraded to pro you would be able to freely access them again. This actually acted as an incentive to go pro, the curtain would be withdrawn from your Flickr photos and everything would be there.
An unfortunate set of circumstances have led to this situation, the main one being Yahoo’s ridiculous 1TB of free storage offer back in 2013. That really devalued Flickr pro, but it also encouraged people to freely upload.
Flickr are obviously a business and their interests are in remaining a viable business but these changes are engaging with far too much stick and nowhere near enough carrot. Storage space isn’t free and costs need to be accounted for but Flickr are giving little incentive for people over the forthcoming 1,000 image limit to go pro.
Whereas Yahoo’s offer was absurd, very few people are likely to be eating far into the current 1TB limit. That would be an immense amount of images and whereas the Yahoo offer did indeed encourage photo dumping, there has to be a better way of asking people to get onboard with Flickr’s needed changes to the free offering than threatening to delete them.
I have a lot of sympathy for the situation Flickr find themselves in but I also have a lot of scorn for the steps they are taking to address the issues.
A positive for Second Life users has appeared on the horizon regarding their usage of Flickr, some people felt that Flickr was no longer going to welcome Second Life users and the Flickr community can at times seem hostile to Second Life, but CEO Don MacAskill stated on the Flickr help forum “Virtual photographer are photographers. You care about photography, so we care about you. It’s that simple. I don’t know where the idea that you aren’t “real” photographers, or that virtual photography is somehow spam, came from but that’s not from me. You are welcome at Flickr”.
Strawberry Singh has a couple of good posts regarding Flickr, in one she looks at alternatives to Flickr and in the other she gives some good tips on Flickr etiquette, one of the most important being that Second Life images should be uploaded as screenshots, you can set this as a default option if you mostly upload Second Life images.
Overall I think Flickr are making a mess with these changes, but as I said I do have a lot of sympathy for the situation they are in, they inherited a mess. Time will tell whether they have made the right move.
I’ve been a FlickrPro member for at least 5 years, paying $24.95 a year. Now they bump the rate to $49.95? An increase after all this time is reasonable, but double? Especially after they’ve gradually made changes over the year that deteriorated the more communal aspects (IMHO), I don’t know if it is worth DOUBLE the rate. I think it’s sad. It’s not like Yahoo! is a small brand that needs every dime they can get. If they do, then they’ve done something wrong in growing their company.
I don’t think they have communicated this as well as they could have but when they revamped Flickr Pro in 2015, I think it was, the price was set at $49.95. Existing pro users were grandfathered in for two years at the old rate of $24.95, so I’m assuming you must have been one of the grandfathered users. New pro users from 2015 onwards would have been paying $49.95.
The grandfathered rate was supposed to end last year, but with all the upheaval it has taken until Smugmug took it over and got their feet under the table before they’ve tossed the grandfathered rate away.
I can understand that it’s quite a shock to see the price doubled.
Apologies — I missed the April announcement that they were purchased by SmugMug. That said, it still doesn’t seem like their “extra offerings” are worth the price hike, especially since one of the competing platforms purchased them.