Flickr will end 1TB of free storage and limit free users to 1,000 photos
Flickr was purchased in April by professional photo hosting service SmugMug, and today, the first major changes under the new ownership have been announced. There's a serious downgrade for free users, who are now limited to 1,000 pictures on the photo sharing site, instead of the free 1TB of storage that was previously offered.
As Flickr explains in its press release announcing the change, "Unfortunately, 'free' services are seldom actually free for users. Users pay with their data or with their time. We would rather the arrangement be transparent." It makes a certain amount of sense — servers aren't free, after all — but for free users with more than 1,000 photos, it's not ideal news.
[...] In what may be the nicest quality-of-life change, starting in January, all users — paid and free — won't have to use Yahoo to log in to Flickr anymore.
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Flickr Will Save All Creative Commons Photos, Deceased Members' Accounts
Flickr will begin deleting photos of accounts over the 1,000 file limit starting on March 12th, but the photo-sharing service has just announced two changes to its policy: spared from deletion will be all Creative Commons photos and the accounts of deceased members.
When Flickr announced its Free account changes back in late 2018, it stated that freely licensed public photos (e.g. Creative Commons, public domain, U.S. government works) uploaded on or before November 1st, 2018, would be spared from the mass deletion.
But Flickr is now going a step further by promising that future Creative Commons photos will be protected as well.
"Creative Commons licenses have been an important part of Flickr since we introduced them on our platform in 2004," Flickr says. "We wanted to make sure we didn't disrupt the hundreds of millions of stories across the global internet that link to freely licensed Flickr images. We know the cost of storing and serving these images is vastly outweighed by the value they represent to the world. In this spirit, today we're going further and now protecting all public, freely licensed images on Flickr, regardless of the date they were uploaded. We want to make sure we preserve these works and further the value of the licenses for our community and for anyone who might benefit from them."
Previously: Flickr to Stop Giving Terabyte of Photo Storage to Free Users
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday November 02 2018, @11:13AM (5 children)
FTFA :
I thought they wanted money.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by The Archon V2.0 on Friday November 02 2018, @02:15PM (3 children)
> I thought they wanted money.
What do you think the data is for? Cattle get free food and pay with their tasty meat, which is then converted to money with the help of someone who wants to sink their teeth into it.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday November 02 2018, @05:09PM (2 children)
Yes I know that, I did see that they mentioned data, but they also said ".... or [users pay] with their time". So how could I pay them with time? Come and sweep their office floor?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @06:06PM
Or with your time spent using the service, seeing sidebar ads, or not.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Friday November 02 2018, @07:59PM
> So how could I pay them with time?
Not knowing Flickr, I don't know, but common ways on social media are by commenting in threads (a lively community draws in more passers-by) and being a volunteer moderator/editor/organizer/free corporate dogsbody for some subpage or special interest group on the site.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday November 04 2018, @02:47AM
Time is money.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @11:37AM (8 children)
I will just sit back and watch flickr fade into obscurity.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @11:48AM
I use flickr to host some game screenshots. It will be a long time before I could reach 1000 of them, and I can delete the old ones.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @12:06PM (6 children)
How so? Free users with more than 1000 images will either pay for the service, reduce their number of images (probably by setting up multiple free Flickr accounts), or abandon the platform all together for ... what free service that will give them storage for more than 1000 images?
I don't use Flickr so I don't have a horse in this race, but storage of 1000 images for free seems reasonable.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Friday November 02 2018, @04:14PM (3 children)
Well, you can make an argument that "1000 images is reasonable" simply because "anything free we give you is reasonable, citizen", but Terabytes is a unit of measure of storage, and "image" isn't. An "image" is just a container for an arbitrary number of pixels.
If I had 3000 200px x 200px "images" on the service, and found out that I could only have "1000 images", I could form 600px x600px composites that are still "images", upload those, and still have room for over 600 more "images", while still storing the same amount of data that I had when it was in "3000 images".
You could make a script to do it in a few minutes using something like wget and imagemagick. Going from a limit on amount of storage to "number of images" is faintly absurd, whatever the numbers are.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Friday November 02 2018, @04:56PM
I did not RTFA but did they put a usage cap on it too? What happens if you did upload more than 1tb of photos? They could be assuming that the majority of people who upload 1k photos will not exceed 1tb, but for the few that do they are still saving space.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @05:40PM (1 child)
Oh FFS. "Each" is a unit of measure, and 1,000 eaches (or maybe 1024 if they are flying their geek flag) is a limit just like 1,000 GBs.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday November 02 2018, @06:12PM
You are not only right about that, but you have helped me to understand the mindset that they have, and are working with. Thank you.
No one with a geek flag would change a storage quota to a "number of inodes" quota without the intervention of someone technology-clueless.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @06:32PM
Hmm, Google Photos? 15GB free storage
Amazon Prime has unlimited photo storage? Yeah, I know, you pay for Amazon Prime, but you get unlimited photo storage in addition to the other benefits that you would pay anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 04 2018, @07:11AM
DeviantArt
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @11:47AM (1 child)
your 1000 pictures average in size more than a gigabyte. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2018, @07:37PM
All hail Flickr, the new home of steganography.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @04:04PM
"Creative Commons is working with SmugMug to preserve the freely licensed (and public domain?) images." (source [archiveteam.org])
(Score: 4, Informative) by richtopia on Friday November 02 2018, @04:35PM (1 child)
If you are an existing free user with more than 1000 photos, migrating to the $50/year plan seems expensive enough that I would look elsewhere. There are many choices:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_image-sharing_websites [wikipedia.org]
Unfortunately Flickr is competing with Facebook and Google, companies who have the resources to give away services like this for free. Best of luck to Flickr in competing with these titans.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 02 2018, @05:26PM
I think (that they think) that they are offering services that are attractive to pro photographers. We'll see if it works. Flickr has had a turbulent history, what with it's Yahoo! involvement, and seemingly peaked years ago.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]