I don't know what my dad will do, he's been using Flickr for quite a few years now, he used to pay for pro, but then stopped doing so after Yahoo bought Flickr and started breaking the UI. He has over 1000 photos, but I am not sure if the pro features are worth the price for him. Fortunately he has local backups of every photo, but it does feel like his photos have been held to ransom. He probably would be willing to pay some money (but less than the current pro) just for the extra storage (and none of the extra features), from what I understand.
To conclude this wall of text, I understand why they're doing it, and hopefully it will make Flickr sustainable, but I feel the way it was done will cause problems when it happens (if it only stopped an account from uploading if it had too many photos, that would help a lot to avoid link rot), and might also cause problems in the future (while morbid to think about, if a pro user dies, they won't be able to pay and a bunch of their images will just get deleted, which could be bad for their families)...
EDIT: fix a few spelling errors and tyops
UPDATE: my dad's response to this is that he will pay for pro to keep his images online. In general, he doesn't feel like Pro is intended for him because it has features he doesn't really care about, he only cares about the storage and community stuff, not the statistics and software stuff.
From the home page.
EDIT: correction, it says they'll first be hidden for about a month, then they will be "actively deleted".
> Free members with more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded to Flickr have until Tuesday, January 8, 2019, to upgrade to Pro or download content over the limit. After January 8, 2019, members over the limit will no longer be able to upload new photos to Flickr. After February 5, 2019, free accounts that contain over 1,000 photos or videos will have content actively deleted -- starting from oldest to newest date uploaded -- to meet the new limit.
I created Talegraph [1] as a platform to tell stories with your pictures, and it has been hard for us to explain to users why paying for the product is the only way to ensure your pictures will stay online and private. Paying for what you use & privacy is not something normal people are used to, but this is the only sustainable way imo.
Have you looked into automatically generating "travel tracks" for each chapter in a Tale from OwnTracks data?[1] An integration like that would definitely make Premium more appealing, and be more interesting than a map with a "pin" on it.
Do you have any plans to add an export ("take out") option that will allow you to download the images, text, captions, etc. as JSON? I worry about investing the time to create some beautiful "tales" but not having a good way to archive them in case you are acquired / shutdown / decide to call it quits.
Dropbox import is planned, I havent looked at SmugMug API's terms yet but will add it to the todolist.
[1] https://www.flickr.com/help/terms/api [2] https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/acceptab...
Much as I try and avoid using Google, I stick with them for the free email and unlimited photo storage.
I'm actually quite fearful of the day when Google will end its generous offer... We often see cloud providers struggling to cope with “unlimited” free plans, perhaps we should take all of them with a grain of salt and rely on local backups precisely to avoid the quasi-extortion that comes when the “unlimited cloud” mantra goes downhill.
1)Gmail is free but does have a storage limit.
2) You can have an unlimited # of photos but not at full/original resolution. If you want full/orig you have to pay.
p.s. "...perhaps we should take all of them with a grain of salt..." Do you mean you haven't been doing this already? :)
Besides the gigabyte price of a harddrive is about 0.02[0], so if google makes a dollar more in advertising it can afford to store quite a bit...
[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
Amazon offers unlimited full resolution photo storage for Prime users...I think I'll move my items there.
We live in a world where most people get twitchy if they haven't looked at their phone for an hour - how is 3 months notice considered so hugely unacceptable in this particular circumstance?
> ... who don't log in/check their email frequently (including their spam folders) or who have technical problems (crap upload speeds, no capacity to download and store gigs of what might be the only existent copies of photos).
This really does sound like a tiny minority of Internet users - sufficient bandwidth and tech savvy to upload > 1000 photos back in the good old days - but insufficient attention, bandwidth, or local storage a decade later to host their own photos.
Just how many people are out there that uploaded to flickr / yahoo and then deleted their local copies of their photos? And how much pandering are they expecting?
"Here's a system I uploaded my most important memories to, but I only look at them every 6 months, and I didn't pay for their storage, but I'm confident that where I dumped them a decade ago will be where they'll stay forever."
I'd be very interested in looking at this research and evidence of correlation between ads and photo data. Can you please cite the reference?
On the other hand, my limited interactions with Smugmug have been stellar. I really like those guys and wish them luck.
The joy of Flickr was exploring the random pictures from ordinary people. I could care less about the heavily Photoshopped "prosumer" stuff that seems to be more popular on the platform. I liked seeing natural skill at composition instead of digital post-processing.
Unfortunately, it looks like SmugMug wants Flickr to be more like SmugMug, so I don't see myself buying back into pro.
Flickr to me was mostly about sharing my photos with friends and family before facebook killed that use case. I don't use facebook much any more, but no one else in my circle uses Flickr either.
Deleting photos over the limit is a bit annoying though. I seem to remember in the past they just made them temporarily inaccessible if you let Pro lapse for a bit (while travelling or whatever).
Time to whip up something that will compare what I have uploaded on flickr (4000+ photos over 12 years) to what's on my local backups so I can download what I have to and forget about the rest.
I am not a full-time photographer; there are runs of time every year where I spend a lot of of time shooting (e.g. live music gigs), and then long periods of inactivity.
I have over 1000 photos on Flickr. I've been a user for over a decade. And I found out about this change from this post, because I haven't been reading the associated Yahoo email that often.
So, leaving my account alone for 3 months = losing most of my photos forever.
Great.
Just the service I want to pay for.
I understand the business need, but perhaps could you take it easy on irreversible changes? Sure, make the photos over the 1K limit unavailable even to the account holders -- but let them buy the access back long after the change.
Not only you might get more subscriptions from that alone, but there's also this:
Unlimited storage might not be feasible for a fixed pricd. Photos are growing larger, dollar is getting cheaper - we're betting on HDD costs going down, but that's not a given.
You might need to have a change in the future.
Again.
And I don't want to lose data because I'd have missed that announcement - just like I missed this one.
How you treat your free users indicates what the paying attention ones can expect.
Please, for the sake of everything that's holy, give your devoted users some goddamn peace of mind that they can camp in the mountains for a year and don't return to see their data gone.
Yahoo! screwed up there - but two wrongs do not make a right.
Not all of us use the service every day. Take it easy on annihilating work and memories.
TL;DR: every account whose data you keep is a potential subscription. Every user whose data you deleted is a guaranteed loss of business and eternal scorn. Please take care of your intermittent, but devoted users.
It did seem like the 1TB limit was too good to last when it was announced 5 years ago.
Still, it's a relatively inexpensive extra archive for my photos (400GB) that supplements other backups. The archive is sorta searchable and kinda good for sharing with family and friends.
I haven't really used their social or community features (the Explore experience, the magic donkey, and the pandas are all alien to me -- https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/361974994 , http://code.flickr.net/2009/03/03/panda-tuesday-the-history-... ).
Too much of searching currently is based on keyword. But photos should be able to be easily searched other ways, like date, location, color, etc. If I could search all of those and limit it to myself or a friends photostream it would really help me find what I'm looking for.
I use it all the time to search my own photos. It tries to figure out the content of the images so I can search for "horses" and it will find every image I have of horses (well of course it's not perfect).
Camera Roll is certainly useful, but I'd love if I could just quickly click on a calendar and see photos from a certain date rather than waiting for Camera Roll to load up and scrolling/filtering through the huge list. I realize Camera Roll has this feature as well, but I miss the old "Archive" version.
I do hope some bot out there is collecting and archiving Flickr's creative commons photos before they disappear for good.
It's not a like-for-like replacement, but GBIF (my employer) indexes a fairly large collection now. You need a scientific (Latin) name for an effective search.
HN's favourite genera are presumably these three: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/gallery?media_type=StillImag...
NB the "license" filter applies to the text parts of the record, many images have a different license.
Of course Flickr are going to find metrics that make this move sound low impact. But are these total accounts made up of mainly dead useless signups from over the years? If the 3% of users are of small significance, then I suspect Flicker wouldn't bother with this update.
Well, that's one way to make the only remaining feature of your product sound like a bad thing...
I've been a pro user for awhile. I guess the downside of this is that I now feel locked in, having well over 1,000 photos. I think previously, had I downgraded to the free version, I'd be able to keep all my photos but no longer provide them as full-size downloads. I don't have a particular complaint with Flickr as a service, it's just I don't do a lot of photography other than casual uploading to Instagram these days. That said, that Smugmug is committed to taking a different, coherent direction provides me with a lot more confidence than the years of Yahoo doing virtually nothing.
edit: maybe I'm grandfathered in for unlimited photos, if I were to downgrade to Free? The wording in the announcement is unclear.
1000 photos can go a long way if used in the way Flickr was originally intended, which as you noted was a portfolio of sorts.
That's not how I'm reading it. It seems like it'll affect all Flickr users across the board.
I mean, that's what they want it to be now, but I don't feel like that's what it was under Yahoo...
Summary, use flickr/smugmug to host and share pics that are curated (get rid of unwanted pics when uploading there). Use iCloud (paid), Google(free) and client side encrypted amazon drive to backup all pics (yes 3 backups and I do not trust amazon's free picture tier not sure what they will do with it, already bitten by them changing plans). Yes, I know Google gets what it wants ability to process my pics.. sigh.
I want to have an honest relation with my service providers, I pay them for a service they give me and I am their customer. Not going to reiterate what has been said numerous times about not being a customer if the service is free..
Flickr is giving up on "growth at all costs and monetize later" model to "we have a good quality focused service but you have to pay..". I would rather pay. The only problem I am now paying for both flickr and smugmug..
Or if you're confident that you can identify photographers whose photos will sell based on engagement with their photos on Flickr, offer an introductory rate for the first year so they can test how well their photos sell. If they sell enough photos to cover the cost of an upgraded plan, paying for an ongoing plan is a no-brainer.
At least, that's my use case as a hobbyist. I currently pay for a basic SmugMug plan. I daydream of upgrading to a Portfolio plan to sell some photos (just for fun), but I don't know that I would manage to sell any. I'm now thinking Flickr might be a better place for me to start testing the water.
As an aside, thank you for removing the Yahoo login. That's been more of a barrier than you would expect for me every time I've wanted to use Flickr in the past. I don't use Yahoo for anything other than Flickr. I think I have more than one account, but I'm not sure, and I don't remember which account has my Flickr albums. It's just a mess. I'll definitely be giving Flickr another chance in January.
I don't have a problem with their decision, and I'll certainly upgrade to pro in the next few weeks. But I also don't use Flickr for "community interaction and exploration of shared interests" - I just want to be able to create albums and put photos in them. So the storage was useful and the ostensible reason for the change (reversing the "tonal shift") doesn't entirely convince me.
But this isn't unexpected, and I think the purchase by SmugMug was a good thing. I just hope they can stop randomly losing my photos after this...
(Edit: s/convince/entirely convince/)
What are you not convinced about? They were pretty clear that people who use Flickr as a storage space rather than a photography community are not their target audience, and therefor will not be the focus of their efforts and goodwill.
I suspect that the change is more to do with the cost of storage than with re-creating some photographic community that may have existed before 2013. But I'm also happy to be proved wrong.
Yes, I am just using Flickr for storage. And while most of my albums are public, my photographic skills are fairly average compared to many on Flickr, so they are unlikely to be able to monetise my efforts. But I'm not interested in being part of a "photographic community" because, while I enjoy photography, I don't do it to be in a community. And I suspect that they see community participation as basically user-generated content creation, and I'm not into that either.
I'm happy to accept that I'm not a user they can support for free. I like Flickr, wish it well, and am happy to pay for pro.
Facebook, Apple Photos, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Photos and Unsplash all do this, with varying trade-offs of cost, quality, and privacy.
So, in other words... You're not the user they're trying to attract. That's exactly what they're saying.
tldr is that I may not be the kind of user that they want or can support for free, but I think my use of the site is valid and I'm happy to pay to continue using it that way.
The rapid phase-out period unnerves me, personally. If I hadn't seen it, and bam, all but 1000 of my tens of thousands of photos were deleted, I don't know what I'd do. Yes, I know, have backups - but moving and organizing tens of thousands of photos takes time and energy. I've also got miscellaneous friends and family that I now have to tell about this change, to download their photos and keep them somewhere else.
I just wish there was a cheaper option for those of us who want to keep our photos on Flickr. $50/year is pretty high; you can get a 1TB hard drive for $38 on Amazon. If there was some kind of intermediate tier I'd really appreciate it.
I know that you want to increase community engagement, and I think that's a noble goal, but consider this: you've got a great photo tool, and some people want to use it for their own personal photos without engaging in the community. In my experience, the uploadr works faster and better than Google Photos or other apps I've tried, and I prefer the interface to other apps. Why not just charge what it costs to run? According to Backblaze [0] disk space now costs them about 2 cents/gigabyte. So about $20 for a terabyte. Now I realize there are costs associated of course - bandwidth etc, maintenance, whatnot - but I'm sure you could profitably offer a limited plan for less than what the current Pro plan costs.
In any case, good luck with Flickr, I'm rooting for you guys.
Quick survey of cloud storage pricing:
Dropbox personal 1TB: $120 / TB / year
Google "One" 2TB: $100 / TB / year
Microsoft OneDrive 1TB: $ 70 / TB / year
Apple iCloud 2TB: $ 60 / TB / year ($120/year)
Flickr "unlimited": $ 50 / year
So, I think Flickr pricing seems in-line (and significantly cheaper than Dropbox.) Of course it depends a bit on what unlimited really means in practice.
I somewhat expected this decision, because 1TB free storage sounds to good to be true from the very beginning. I know, I will loose all my edited photos, geotags, edited descriptions and all my additions on flickr. I've uploaded publicly thousands with them of points of interest and with free to use licence, but seems that there is nothing to do. All the photos will remain buried in a forgotten hdd, somewhere in the bottom of a case.
But, .... it seems like they're jumping the gun here. I went to go resign up for Pro but you still have to do it through your Yahoo account!!!
I don't want yahoo even associated with my flickr account but I could find no way to disassociate the yahoo account.
Shouldn't they fix that before rolling out this change?
(or maybe I missed how)
But other than that I am 100% on-board with this strategy. Get done with the "free" accounts already.
Haven't bother to go through the T&C but I hope they have clause that say they are not allowed to use your data for data-mining/advertising.
I think there's a strong case for creating an intermediate tier. $10 a year for 10k photos, but none of the other pro perks would be a pretty fair offer, I think. I'd sign up (well, not right away... I don't and won't have a Flickr account until I don't need a Yahoo address to get one.)
Then again, from a business standpoint I welcome the decision. I'd rather have a free place to host a 1000 photos than no Flickr at all. I welcome their stance alleged stance of treating users as priority rather than as just advertisement data generators.
I say alleged because I don't know how well these promises of users first are applied in practice but I'm hopeful.
At least they are upfront about it so kudos to Flickr for that.
I have no interest in their Pro Statistics or the list of 'partner discounts' they bundle into Pro. Nor the ability to upload 10 minute videos.
Strip out that crap and just sell a Flickr Subscriber account for less money, please.
Perhaps you're an exception, but I'd bet good money that 90+% of the people saying this easily spend more than $50 per annum on gear and software.
Now whe I go to Flickr I see a lot more photo plagiarism by throwaway accounts, to say nothing of dank memes.
If Flickr offers better integration of their photo storage with blogging platforms and the like, it would be very well worth the Pro account. And by concentrating on helping peopel who gather photos for public presentation, they'd be offering a service that isn't quite like the shutterbug demographic they want, but is still on the same tenor.
I had sympathy for Flickr as community like 8-10 years ago but haven't been using actively Flickr for couple of years - as it became slowly unusable. I had to write my own scripts to import all my photos as their tools stooped being developed 10 years ago. [1]
At the moment Flickr webpage is quite unusable (if you block aggressive tracking from Yahoo and other 3-rd parties on DNS level), Flickr app is unusable for privacy reasons - installation on Android requires access to identity, contacts and microphone) and logging to Flickr requires giving some weird permissions to Oath (whoever it is).
So with all the sympathy for the new owners of Flickr I think it is a bit premature to ask loyal users for ransom before putting it's house in order and showing what the new Flickr would be. It is just asking me to pay for the development in unknown direction.
I got the message and I will not be using their services in the future as they cannot be considered by me as serious and trusted.
Sry but that is not 'ransom'.
And srsly you used it and never paid? Do you think they want you?
Questions:
1. To the extent reprocessing is necessary, will that be done automatically (e.g. as it is for photos originally uploaded at full resolution, and now being displayed at 5K)?
2. Do all mobile OSs provide the color profile management necessary for the app to properly display photos? I know this was a challenge in the past.
3. Will there be any indication a photo is outside of sRGB, aside from EXIF?
P.S. - I'm sure you're aware, but there's a (closed) group of alpha/beta users (https://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrbeta/) always eager to help provide feedback.
I definitely think it's enough time to cut off new upload for people over the limit, but you should strongly consider whether or not your storage costs are that high as to make it worth it to not give a longer runway for people to export.
When I upload photos, Flickr looks at the taken date of the photo and sorts them that way. When I upload videos from the computer (using the upload tool), Flickr does NOT look at the metadata to set the taken date. Instead, then taken date is set to the current date meaning the videos are out of order of the photos.
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2018/10/31/putting-your-best-photo...
And if they happen to not pay attention to announcements like these they might find their photo's irreverably gone in a few months.
Moves like this, so soon after the acquisition, with 0 lenience for existing users makes me not trust Flickr/SmugSmug anymore. What will be the next step when they will randomly delete your photo's?
but i think this was horrible messaging. I would have much rather appreciated a more straightforward approach, instead of trying to get me to be excited for being limited to 1,000 images and video. I think it shows flickr still has a ways to go in building trust - because being disingenuous in messaging doesn't build it.
flickr app it's absolutely horrible, impossible to organize or share photos which i would like to do, but it's pretty much impossible so i just used it as backup, so good luck with your business if you think you will turn those free users into paid with this strategy and i will keep my public photos there for people to see, just going to delete account (10yo+) and finally get rid of yahoo account (at last one benefit from this mess), because apparently photographer enough if i am not willing to pay for sharing few photos andyou think 1000 photos it's enough for years
and if someone is into real photography they are already long time on 500px, so once again who needs paid flickr? might as well shut it down instead of this slow death and blackmailing users who dunno any better how to transfer photos and set their own cloud
I'll probably end up paying for a couple of months of Pro before deleting everything (as it'll take some time to migrate onto another service).
What frustrates me is that this is the second service that I use that changed it's T&Cs on me this year which needed a lot of work to redo my websites (the other was Google Maps which went from free to $2k/month).
Flickr needs to make money, but I'll bet the fallout will be bad as this change affects a bunch of users who have no idea that it is coming. Presumably the 3% of free people with more than 1k photos are causing significant costs and Flickr wants to dump them.
As a paid SmugMug user, is there is discount for signing up for a paid flickr account? I saw that there is a discount to become a SmugMug user listed on Flickr Pro Perks.
Having more than 1000 pix means I'm now a pro member again, which I let lapse when storage went to 1 ter. Though, my ~38,000 pics only take up 5% of that terabyte. Some of those 2004 pictures are really tiny. Photography may not be as much of a focus for me now, but those early days were really engaging, here's hoping SM brings some of the magic back.
Having lots of pictures, and albums has made sorting, managing them much harder with the Organize browser tool. I'm interested how Smugmug will be improving the experience of managing photos and albums.
Will Organize be getting some of the new direction focus?
I mostly agree with the direction they want to take, I just don't want to be part of the journey and so want to get my photos out.
> Free members with more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded to Flickr have until Tuesday, January 8, 2019, to upgrade to Pro or download content over the limit. After January 8, 2019, members over the limit will no longer be able to upload new photos to Flickr. After February 5, 2019, free accounts that contain over 1,000 photos or videos will have content actively deleted -- starting from oldest to newest date uploaded -- to meet the new limit.
I have a Pro account so maybe it's different, but I have a "Request my Flickr data" button in the bottom right of my account page: https://www.flickr.com/account
And unless something has changed recently, IIRC, Flickr had a very generous and fairly easy to use JSON API. In the past I've been able to bulk download my ~10,000 photos with just a few calls: https://idratherbewriting.com/learnapidoc/docapis_flickr_exa...
Also: this is is not the only criteria, but do any of them allow a custom domain?
Long term Flickr Pro user (signed up 2007) and when my Pro sub expires a year from now there's some compelling reasons to dump Flickr and migrate to SmugMug - not least that SM's had literally anything done with it in the last few years, while Flickr's just got clunkier and clunkier (but also that there's a bunch of old, not-good, photos that I don't really care about on there).
The quality of the "community" on both Flickr and 500px makes the de-prioritisation of the same on SmugMug an advantage too - there's way too much spam on Flickr, although even that's dropped off over the last few years.
I wasn't able to get a bare domain (e.g. domainname.tld) to work directly, so i set up a redirect to www.domainname.tld from there and it's been good for me. I don't know if that has changed since I set it up.
Besides custom domain: what are the pros/cons of Flickr vs SmugMug?
That's what I do. Until now Flickr was my storage for all pictures and 500px only for my best.
I've been a Flickr Pro user for ages. Flickr was one of the things that got me into photography and improved my skills. I learned how to take better pictures by looking at other photos and seeing what kind of feedback mine got.
Then Yahoo aquired it and Flickr just fizzled out. I kept taking pictures but it wasn't the same without a community to share them with. It really made me sad.
I truly hope Flickr can return to the fantastic site it used to be and everything about this announcement reads like they have their head on straight.
If one thing were to make me want to consider Flickr's services, this statement alone would be it.
Does anyone have data on how Google Photos generates revenue? Is it just a mechanism to upsell Google Drive storage quotas? Or are they also mining the photo meta data?
-- Bradley Horowitz, Google VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing (2015)
So yes, using info from the photos is definitively on the table. But I doubt they made Photos with a specific income stream in mind; they want to know everything about everything and everyone. The possibilities (for monetization and much more) are tremendously higher when you can leverage the connections between datasets, even if they are kinda lame by themselves.
That sounds terrible. He attempts to soften it by using an example that seems very important/critical (a vehicle "recall") instead of saying something like "If Google Photos can tell you like Starbucks and Startbucks wanted to show ads to you, that would be a service that we would consider offering"
However, I lost the thread of the argument at the penultimate paragraph. If the “vast majority” of current free users will still qualify, why will this change the community in a significant way?
Is Flickr worth 1.5x my monthly ISP cost? That's a trickier calculation.
Plus Flickr only bill in USD so my bank will charge a foreign-transaction fee too.
https://www.flickr.com/lookingahead/?utm_campaign=flickr-loo...
Maybe: Storage is expensive, and we'd rather collect money from you, rather than sell you to advertisers.
As an aside, if you were looking to subscribe to their Pro product, the link in the blog post contains a coupon for $15 off their yearly subscription.
Servers cost money. People making the software and running the servers cost money. Previously those costs were hidden from end-users, usually by advertising-based business models. Now that consumers aren't putting up with that as much, smart companies are doing the old-fashioned thing of charging people for the valuable services they provide, instead of selling off human attention to advertisers. On the whole, this kind of stuff is better for everyone.
Now I would be "forced" to pay, which in itself wouldn't be all too bad I guess.
> I thought about storing all my family photos on flicker a few years ago... Would have been useless now.
No, it would have been exactly as you just said. You'd start paying and your backup would still be there.
