OT: Flickr sets a limit of 1,000 photos for free accounts

[fiamme red]

https://www.cnet.com/news/flickr-1000-photo-limit-for-free-accounts-in-subscription-push/

If you're a free member, Flickr will work the same through Jan. 8, at which point you won't be able to upload any new photos or videos if you already are past the 1,000 limit. You'll have until Feb. 5 to upgrade to a pro subscription or download your Flickr photos. After that, Flickr will start deleting older photos and videos, leaving the 1,000 most recently uploaded shots.I can't disagree with their decision to limit photos for free accounts in the future. I wonder why YouTube hasn't done the same thing.

But I'm very sorry that many old photos that are archived on Flickr will vanish.

[kppolich]

Ouch, THe free used to be 1TB now its 1,000 photos. Time to find somewhere else to host photos.

https://www.imore.com/how-close-your-flickr-account

[raygunner]

Thanks for the heads up! I just recently was loading tons of photos onto Flickr...

[Spaghetti Legs]

Good to know - thanks. Looks like they are going about this better than the a$$hats at photobucket who shut down free accounts without warning. I’m cool with this change as I just use it for online posting anyway. I wouldn’t trust my complete photo collection to a free service.

[MattTuck]

I'd be very fascinated to see what people save in their flickr accounts. I bet lots of boring photographs, but maybe some crazy stuff every now and then.

[unterhausen]

I have seen some weird stuff on nominally bike-related flickr accounts. I don't have 1000 pics on my account, which is too bad. I mostly just store pictures on google now, since they all come from my phone and are automatically uploaded to google.

[Aldus]

Glad there was a warning given before deleting users photo's at random.

[onekgguy]

Thanks for the heads-up. I just signed up for the pro account with the 30% discount in the link. It came to $35. If I'm not mistaken, their pro accounts up until around 4 years ago were $60. I don't mind paying for this service.

Kevin g

[GonaSovereign]

$35 or $60'per year is totally fair. Thngs aren't free.

[fiamme red]

I got this message from Flickr. They are asking you to join Flickr Pro in order to keep Flickr alive.

"Use and share coupon code 25in2019 to get 25% off Flickr Pro now."

Dear friends,
Flickr—the world’s most-beloved, money-losing business—needs your help.

Two years ago, Flickr was losing tens of millions of dollars a year. Our company, SmugMug, stepped in to rescue it from being shut down and to save tens of billions of your precious photos from being erased.

Why? We’ve spent 17 years lovingly building our company into a thriving, family-owned and -operated business that cares deeply about photographers. SmugMug has always been the place for photographers to showcase their photography, and we’ve long admired how Flickr has been the community where they connect with each other. We couldn’t stand by and watch Flickr vanish.

So we took a big risk, stepped in, and saved Flickr. Together, we created the world’s largest photographer-focused community: a place where photographers can stand out and fit in.

We’ve been hard at work improving Flickr. We hired an excellent, large staff of Support Heroes who now deliver support with an average customer satisfaction rating of above 90%. We got rid of Yahoo’s login. We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the way. As a result, pages are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built once again.

Our work is never done, but we’ve made tremendous progress.

Now Flickr needs your help. It’s still losing money. Hundreds of thousands of loyal Flickr members stepped up and joined Flickr Pro, for which we are eternally grateful. It’s losing a lot less money than it was. But it’s not yet making enough.

We need more Flickr Pro members if we want to keep the Flickr dream alive.

We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow. Unlike platforms like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to invade your privacy and sell your data. We bought it because we love photographers, we love photography, and we believe Flickr deserves not only to live on but thrive. We think the world agrees; and we think the Flickr community does, too. But we cannot continue to operate it at a loss as we’ve been doing.

Flickr is the world’s largest photographer-focused community. It’s the world’s best way to find great photography and connect with amazing photographers. Flickr hosts some of the world’s most iconic, most priceless photos, freely available to the entire world. This community is home to more than 100 million accounts and tens of billions of photos. It serves billions of photos every single day. It’s huge. It’s a priceless treasure for the whole world. And it costs money to operate. Lots of money.

Flickr is not a charity, and we’re not asking you for a donation. Flickr is the best value in photo sharing anywhere in the world. Flickr Pro members get ad-free browsing for themselves and their visitors, advanced stats, unlimited full-quality storage for all their photos, plus premium features and access to the world’s largest photographer-focused community for less than $5 per month.

You likely pay services such as Netflix and Spotify at least $9 per month. I love services like these, and I’m a happy paying customer, but they don’t keep your priceless photos safe and let you share them with the most important people in your world. Flickr does, and a Flickr Pro membership costs less than $1 per week.

Please, help us make Flickr thrive. Help us ensure it has a bright future. Every Flickr Pro subscription goes directly to keeping Flickr alive and creating great new experiences for photographers like you. We are building lots of great things for the Flickr community, but we need your help. We can do this together.

We’re launching our end-of-year Pro subscription campaign on Thursday, December 26, but I want to invite you to subscribe to Flickr Pro today for the same 25% discount.

We’ve gone to great lengths to optimize Flickr for cost savings wherever possible, but the increasing cost of operating this enormous community and continuing to invest in its future will require a small price increase early in the new year, so this is truly the very best time to upgrade your membership to Pro.

If you value Flickr finally being independent, built for photographers and by photographers, we ask you to join us, and to share this offer with those who share your love of photography and community.

With gratitude,

Don MacAskill
Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Geek
SmugMug + Flickr

Use and share coupon code 25in2019 to get 25% off Flickr Pro now.

[azrider]

In similar fashion to the drug pusher.......first couple times are free then (once you're hooked) ya gotta start payin :p:p:p

But this seems fair. Servers/Storage/Compute/Networking aint free.

[raygunner]

Just signed up for a pro acct. I've been meaning to for quite awhile & it was great to login again & see some great old gems...I'm looking forward to adding more photos & getting organized for 2020!

[goonster]

I wonder why YouTube hasn't done the same thing.

Because it's free content they can monetize.

First thing I thought of was that we will lose access to the Flickr archive of Ezra Caldwell who has 3,800 images, and is no longer among the living.

[BobbyJones]

Little known fact: YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world. That’s a lot of eyeballs.

[unterhausen]

Flickr has gotten a lot nicer since smugmug bought it. I'm not really sure it's worth it to me, I only have 200 pictures on there and that number doesn't grow that quickly.

I wouldn't mind supporting them at some lower level. I'm cheap enough that I'm reluctant to throw someone $50 just because. I'm paying google for storage, too bad their picture sharing isn't as easy as flickr