Changes to Flickr Photos

[US71]

Big changes coming with Flickr photos: free accounts will be limited to 1000 photos, unless you pay $50 a year. I've got 12 years worth of stuff there. No way can I download and move it all.
Bastiches.

[kphoger]

Uh oh, Eric Stuve...

[US71]

Looks like there are 3 options: Free (1000 photos), Annual ($50) or Monthly ($6). I opted for the Annual option and got 30 percent off. 

[froggie]

^ That's a doubling of the annual price.  Had been $24.95.

[US71]

^ That's a doubling of the annual price.  Had been $24.95.

Buying websites costs money </s>

[Max Rockatansky]

Had a feeling this was coming, $50 isn't too bad for a full year considering how many photos I host on the site.  Way better than the shit Photobucket was trying to pull. 

[hotdogPi]

I have between 200 and 300, but I know I'll eventually reach 1000. I might have to delete some of the not as good quality ones.

I have the ability to host photos on this forum, but I don't want to host thousands here (there are only a few hundred existing, by all users combined, right now).

[Brandon]

Well, at least Fucker..Flickr has a free option.  Photofuckit on the other hand...

[busman_49]

With over 20k photos, I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.  I've been paying for pro now for a few years; guess I'll just fork over another $25...

[formulanone]

Well, that's going to leave a mark...going to have to cull out about 14,000 photos from my collection. I hadn't paid for it since I paid for hosting for many years, but ended that after Flickr became so much more useful (and free), and I hadn't had much time for creating a website, anyhow.

Wikimedia Commons seems to have duplicated about 800 of them; I wonder if I can alert the bot to scoop up the rest.

[traffic light guy]

Damn, what the hell, thank God I have back up files on my drive and SD Card. I guess it's time for me to upgrade to pro

LG-M327

[MNHighwayMan]

Damn, what the hell, thank God I have back up files on my drive and SD Card. I guess it's time for me to upgrade to pro

And this is the point where I mention that it's a bad idea to solely rely on a hosting service for storage.

[Max Rockatansky]

Damn, what the hell, thank God I have back up files on my drive and SD Card. I guess it's time for me to upgrade to pro

And this is the point where I mention that it's a bad idea to solely rely on a hosting service for storage.

I use my lap top and a hard drive, Flickr is the third backup.

[MNHighwayMan]

Three places is good. I keep mine on two hard drives, one connected and one I keep in a safe, and the third is my Dropbox account. A bunch of my stuff is on Imgur, too, but I don't really count that as a backup.

[US71]

I tried the new desktop uploader, but didn't like it. It wants to take all my photos and put them in a private album where I can decide which ones to share.  I usually save my photos to CD and share the ones I want to share. I'm not sure I trust SmugMug/Flickr to keep my photos safe.  And if I ever opt out of the Pro package, I'll have to download everything if I want to save them.

[formulanone]

Damn, what the hell, thank God I have back up files on my drive and SD Card. I guess it's time for me to upgrade to pro

And this is the point where I mention that it's a bad idea to solely rely on a hosting service for storage.

Between the two portable hard drives, another home computer, and Google Photos...I'm okay. I'll weigh my options and might go back web hosting for just a little bit more per year.

But there's always those which probably never think twice about the scads of cell phone photos and videos they've taken over the years; whether they regret losing it is another matter. I always want to say..."Who is still doing this?" after all the lessons learned, but not everyone thinks about backing up their important stuff, especially those who effectively have only a single device (typically, their phone).

Hell, I'm still annoyed by losing a mere 50-60 photos from a trip to Texas 7 years ago...don't try to move files while hurriedly getting into an airplane seat.

[US 89]

This is such bullshit. Greed gets in the way of the photography community again.

I think the thing that bothers me most about this is that I have received zero communication from Flickr about this change. No emails, no notifications on Flickr itself, nothing. It also bothers me that the grandfather clause on this is limited to "We'll give you a 30% discount on Flickr Pro for the first year! Buy anytime now through November 30!" They're planning on actively deleting photos to get existing users below the 1000-photo limit, and I assume users get no say in which photos are deleted.

I don't use Flickr to store photos; of the 2,579 photos I currently have on Flickr, the vast majority of them are also stored on my laptop. The primary reason I have my Flickr account is to be able to host photos to post them into this forum; I guess I'll have to search every one of my 1511 posts in here to figure out which photos I definitely want to save.

[hotdogPi]

I assume users get no say in which photos are deleted.

The 1000 most recent ones are kept.

[MNHighwayMan]

This is such bullshit. Greed gets in the way of the photography community again.

I think the thing that bothers me most about this is that I have received zero communication from Flickr about this change. No emails, no notifications on Flickr itself, nothing. It also bothers me that the grandfather clause on this is limited to "We'll give you a 30% discount on Flickr Pro for the first year! Buy anytime now through November 30!" They're planning on actively deleting photos to get existing users below the 1000-photo limit, and I assume users get no say in which photos are deleted.

I agree with calling it bullshit. There's going to be dead links everywhere once this goes through, including here. Truly unfortunate.

[AsphaltPlanet]

While I agree it's unfortunate, I think the old mantra that you get what you pay for is still correct.

I've always paid for image hosting (and paid more per year that what Flickr charges for pro service).  The perk of that is that I get my own FTP site and it's really easy to drag and drop photons into specific folders that I have created and can organize.

[MNHighwayMan]

While I agree it's unfortunate, I think the old mantra that you get what you pay for is still correct.

For sure. I have no problem with Flickr charging for their service. What I think is a dick move is deleting free users' images in excess of 1000. They're already hosting the images, so why can't they simply just leave the excess in place, and not allow those users to upload more images until they've dropped below the limit again?

[AsphaltPlanet]

I suppose that is a dick move, I can't argue with that.

I am kind of surprised though that people would feel comfortable enough uploading an image to a free web hosting service and then not keeping a local backup.  It sounds like that is the case for a number of members here.  I would never do that.  I have (at least one) local backup of every image that I have taken, and would have never felt comfortable uploading a photo to a free web hosting service and felt confident that it would have been stored there in perpetuity.

[US 89]

I am kind of surprised though that people would feel comfortable enough uploading an image to a free web hosting service and then not keeping a local backup.  It sounds like that is the case for a number of members here.  I would never do that.  I have (at least one) local backup of every image that I have taken, and would have never felt comfortable uploading a photo to a free web hosting service and felt confident that it would have been stored there in perpetuity.

Especially after Photobucket. The deal with some of my Flickr photos is that while every single one of them has a local backup somewhere, the location of that backup is not always convenient. I have some pictures from a 2010 trip to Seattle where the only local backup I have is an ancient laptop sitting in my parents' closet somewhere that seems unlikely to ever turn on again. I suppose I'll have to download those.

[vdeane]

Stuff like this me glad that I keep all my pictures in my /home/vdeane/Pictures folder (which is regularly backed up to an external drive along with everything else in /home/vdeane), with the ones I want to share with the roadgeek community on my website's own photo gallery.

[busman_49]

Damn, what the hell, thank God I have back up files on my drive and SD Card. I guess it's time for me to upgrade to pro

And this is the point where I mention that it's a bad idea to solely rely on a hosting service for storage.

I use my lap top and a hard drive, Flickr is the third backup.

I just use Flickr to share my photos with others.  I user a laptop and an external drive for backup.  Yeah, I'm gonna pay the extra for pro...