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Future of Flickr


Kobayashi

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If anyone here has a Free 1TB Flickr account, you're out of luck. Starting February 5, 2019, Flickr (now owned by Smugmug) will delete all photos that is above the 1,000 photo limit for free users using 1TB. If anyone has a free account, I consider migrating your photos elsewhere. Pro users here are exempted. 

My account, has been around since 2010, though I uploaded large amounts of photos in 2015 since Majhost servers suddenly went offline. I may able to move most of my photo collection to Google Photos starting in December

Flickr was acquired by SmugMug a while ago from Yahoo, which was bought by Verizon last year.

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Source: SlashGear

What does the Flickr Pro Account Membership include?
• Unlimited Storage of photos and videos at full resolution
• 5K Photo Display
• Video Playback is limited to 10 minutes (instead of the most recent limit of 3 minutes)
• Premiere Customer Service
• OG Pro badges (they look pretty and make you feel like you’re cooler than everyone without a badge)
• Advanced Stats
• Ad-Free Browsing

How many photos and videos can a Flickr Free account store?

The newest version of Flickr has a limit of 1,000 photos and videos. These photos and videos are not limited in size – but if you’re not going to pony up some cash to the new SmugMug gods of Flickr, you’re going to have a strict limit of 1k bits of media. Don’t expect leniency if we get to January 2019 and you’ve got more than 1K photos and/or videos and you’re merely a free member – get to downloading now!

 

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This is a most unfortunate change, and I really wish they'd left more space for free users, but I'm going to pay for the upgrade. Flickr is an excellent organizational tool that Dropbox and Google Photos just can't compare to... not to mention, my photo collection is so huge I imagine I'd need 3-4 Google accounts just to store all of it.

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I found this to be a good read that explained why they are making the change. 

1TB is a hell of a lot of storage, and bandwidth associated with it, to give away for free with very minimal advertising. 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/11/01/photo-site-flickr-adds-unlimited-storage-pros-lowers-free-usage/1812495002/

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9 hours ago, PCC Guy said:

This is a most unfortunate change, and I really wish they'd left more space for free users, but I'm going to pay for the upgrade. Flickr is an excellent organizational tool that Dropbox and Google Photos just can't compare to... not to mention, my photo collection is so huge I imagine I'd need 3-4 Google accounts just to store all of it.

Thank you for choosing to support a service you use, instead of expecting everything for free.  I've had flickr pro for eons and likely will continue after my subscription ends.  Nothing in this world is free, yet everyone seems to want the free handouts.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 11/4/2018 at 10:55 PM, awstott said:

Thank you for choosing to support a service you use, instead of expecting everything for free.  I've had flickr pro for eons and likely will continue after my subscription ends.  Nothing in this world is free, yet everyone seems to want the free handouts.

Agreed! I was happy to see SmugMug buy them honestly, I was thinking Google or Facebook might snap them up and turn it into a big ad revenue user data collection mine. I certainly have no plans to leave Flickr anytime soon, unless they seriously screw the site up or something. I wish they would've offered some sort of middle option, like 5000 uploads for $12 a year, but $1 a week for unlimited uploads and hosting isn't terrible.

The only downside with this new free account limit is when someone passes or just forgets about renewing their account, we potentially can lose a treasure trove of historic photos.

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On 11/17/2018 at 10:10 PM, MVTArider said:

The only downside with this new free account limit is when someone passes or just forgets about renewing their account, we potentially can lose a treasure trove of historic photos.

This is what I am worried about. With the passing of Zack Willhoite, his flickr pro account is left abandoned and probably cannot be renewed by someone else unless they know his password. It would be ideal if someone such as family could renew it, but we don't know what the situation is for that matter. I also wish I could just archive all of his photos, but he has a ton of photos and I would not have the time to archive each and every one, not to mention have a place to store all of those archive links if the main pages cannot be correctly archived for some reason. 

I almost want to contact flickr about this because it would be a huge loss if all of his photos were to be deleted, as they probably could not be easily retrieved again. He had many one of a kind photos too.

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14 hours ago, Detroit Diesel 6V92TA said:

I almost want to contact flickr about this because it would be a huge loss if all of his photos were to be deleted, as they probably could not be easily retrieved again. He had many one of a kind photos too.

Actually, does anyone have a way to contact a family member of his to see if there was any password or login left behind? If there was I'm sure someone close to him would be happy to accept a donation and keep the account active.

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13 hours ago, MVTArider said:

Actually, does anyone have a way to contact a family member of his to see if there was any password or login left behind? If there was I'm sure someone close to him would be happy to accept a donation and keep the account active.

My only thought is that maybe his wife knows his password, but I can't be certain. I'm hoping someone can reach out before it is too late.

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I understand SmugMug's reasoning behind the new changes but for me it is not going to work.  I am a high school student and obviously my priorities can't just be on this, have to buy camera equipment (or possibly pay to go places to do photography in the future).  I will still be using Flickr as a free user (I am still at less than 800 photos so I should be good for a little while) but shortly I might have to delete a few of my older (and crappier) shots.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 11/20/2018 at 11:29 PM, MVTArider said:

Actually, does anyone have a way to contact a family member of his to see if there was any password or login left behind? If there was I'm sure someone close to him would be happy to accept a donation and keep the account active.

Looks like Flickr now has a GivePro donation option. If nobody does it for Zack's account before the dead line, I will pay the $42 and do it. His photos are too historic to lose.

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On 12/12/2018 at 6:11 PM, Matt Dunlop said:

Wow. Thankfully I have 999 photos, so nothing of mine will be lost! I'm not going to pay for pro... not when I can upload photos to Facebook for free. 

But the drawback of Facebook is that they compresses the photos to a lower quality. The ability to post photos to Flickr on full-resolution, as well as having over 9,000 historically valuable pictures on my Flickr is the only reason I paid for it.

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On 11/22/2018 at 6:13 PM, TechSpotlight said:

I understand SmugMug's reasoning behind the new changes but for me it is not going to work.  I am a high school student and obviously my priorities can't just be on this, have to buy camera equipment (or possibly pay to go places to do photography in the future).  I will still be using Flickr as a free user (I am still at less than 800 photos so I should be good for a little while) but shortly I might have to delete a few of my older (and crappier) shots.

For some perspective, when I was a high school student taking photos of buses, it was on film, and I spent way more than $50USD annually on film and printing/development costs. 

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On 12/12/2018 at 11:10 AM, Detroit Diesel 6V92TA said:

Looks like Flickr now has a GivePro donation option. If nobody does it for Zack's account before the dead line, I will pay the $42 and do it. His photos are too historic to lose.

I would love to see that. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Today Flickr user Calibusguy1 (my friend Reese) and I decided to both chip in $21 each and now Zack Willhoite's account is safe. https://www.flickr.com/photos/busdudedotcom/ I don't have a Flickr and he doesn't plan on using his enough to get pro, but we both agreed it was worth it to pay for Zack's account. 

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  • 2 months later...
On 12/29/2018 at 9:01 AM, Detroit Diesel 6V92TA said:

Today Flickr user Calibusguy1 (my friend Reese) and I decided to both chip in $21 each and now Zack Willhoite's account is safe. https://www.flickr.com/photos/busdudedotcom/ I don't have a Flickr and he doesn't plan on using his enough to get pro, but we both agreed it was worth it to pay for Zack's account. 

https://flickr.kustomer.help/in-memoriam-flickr-accounts-HJA_AcTL4

It looks like Flickr now has a dedicated method of dealing with exactly this sort of situation.

Also just want to say thanks again to you and Reese for donating to keep his account together :)

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User crown426 was a pro user for the longest time. I recently noticed it says give pro on his account now, which worried me since he has over 12,000 photos, many that are one of a kind. I wonder how all of his photos are still up, unless they give you a certain amount of time to renew pro. https://www.flickr.com/photos/crown426

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  • 3 weeks later...

Just a random observation/comment... I'm finding it quite intriguing that even though my money is going towards more useful expenditures than Flickr Pro, all 9400+ of my Flickr photos are still up, after all these months of them announcing they'll be deleting all photos over the 1000 limit on free accounts ?

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  • 4 months later...

Looks like Flickr has ads now...

image.thumb.png.728877043f3104e4aee4e738ad74a117.png

I am not sure if any accounts have actually suffered the mass photo deletion the site promised early this year to those who don't pay for Flickr Pro. I haven't seen any cases of this myself including on my own account (despite selecting 'yes' to mark photos for deletion when I was prompted at one point), which leads me to deduce that they have scrapped that plan.

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10 hours ago, Nick B said:

I am not sure if any accounts have actually suffered the mass photo deletion the site promised early this year to those who don't pay for Flickr Pro. I haven't seen any cases of this myself including on my own account (despite selecting 'yes' to mark photos for deletion when I was prompted at one point), which leads me to deduce that they have scrapped that plan.

In my opinion, that seemed like a scare tactic.  It seems like they decided to not delete photos for a few reasons, especially for accounts whose owners are now deceased or inactive users who are unaware of the change.

However, I highly doubt “normal” people with photos above the 1,000 photo limit will be able to upload unless they delete photos.  Since my account is way below the limit, I can’t double check if this is accurate.

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  • 4 months later...

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