
Flickr free accounts will soon be limited to 1,000 photos or videos - DyslexicAtheist
https://www.flickr.com/lookingahead/
======
sctb
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18354066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18354066).

------
deftnerd
I wonder why they landed on the "deleting oldest content first" format. The
oldest items are the ones less likely to be backed up by users.

They had lots of options, including removing original quality images and just
keeping resized images, archiving the photos off-platform and charging users
to restore them from the archive, or deleting the photos that had the least
views.

Not sure which, if any of those, might be a better option, but the one they
went with has lots of downsides too.

~~~
mc32
I agree. Back when Flickr was independent, you could upload as many images as
you liked, but only the freshest 200 were visible. Your idea of offlining them
and bringing images back when you become a paying customer sounds reasonable
to me. I hope they heed your advice.

~~~
notimetorelax
I believe this may run afoul of some data retention regulations. E.g. GDPR
requires a minimum of data to be retained: [https://www.dpnetwork.org.uk/gdpr-
data-retention-guide/](https://www.dpnetwork.org.uk/gdpr-data-retention-
guide/)

~~~
beberlei
It doesn't. GDPR applies to personal data, which photos are not (most of the
time).

As long as you have an active user account on Flickr the contract / terms of
use apply with regard to retention of photos, which Flickr can probably change
as per their previous ToS that you accepted when signing up.

~~~
notyourwork
And users have the right to request their data at any time and also request it
be purged. These two premises add lots of process overhead to an otherwise
innocent looking law from the outside.

------
bad_user
People might remember Flickr for its communities, but I remember it for being
a great archive of public photos.

I have over 22,000 photos in my account — all of them privately shared with my
family.

I'm a Pro user, however I only became a Pro thinking that if I stop paying,
then the photos I uploaded will be safe from deletion. And I renewed my
subscription right after SmugMug announced the acquisition, along with saying
that they " _don 't have any plans to change free accounts_". I guess that
wasn't a reasonable expectation.

Unfortunately I might have to move off Flickr because it's not a safe storage
for my photos. I guess that's the point of their upgrade, heh? They don't want
archives, they want communities.

Except that for actually sharing photos with people, Facebook, Instagram,
Google Photos are wildly more popular. Which makes Flickr just a forum with a
slow interface.

\---

I do understand the business reasons. If it keeps the lights on, then I guess
it's better than the alternative.

But I'm also afraid that this will kill Flickr for good.

~~~
baldfat
If you continue with your Pro-Account you still get unlimited photo uploads
and nothing is changing for you as long as you continue to be a pro-
subscriber. I liked the way it was before. You keep all your latest 200 photos
but the rest are in archive unless you pay for a pro-account.

Personally I moved to Google Photos for all my photos backup and sharing. I
have a personal server that has a backup of all my raw and high quality photos
to keep.

------
Skye
As I mentioned in another comment thread (is that the term used here?) about
this
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18354066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18354066)),
I can understand why they want to limit the free service, the only thing that
makes me a bit concerned is the fact that they want to delete images over the
limit, rather than not allowing new uploads or freezing accounts for existing
accounts which will go over the new limit. I just get worried when stuff on
the public Internet is deleted in cases like these.

~~~
Klover
The uploader then doesn’t worry, Flickr doesn’t worry. The internet archive
might, just like you. Maybe you can help out over there?

~~~
Skye
The uploader can't do anything short of paying money to keep the images up.
They could move them, but that is still link rot.

I would help with archiving stuff, but I don't have the resources
unfortunately. All I can do is not delete my downloads folder, so incase the a
site goes down, I still have a copy of the stuff I downloaded earlier, which
is better than nothing, I hope.

------
petepete
This is a step in the right direction. The thing that made Flickr good was the
community feeling, interactions with other photographers and groups.

The unlimited photos option made people use it like a backup/archival service.
People would upload _all_ their images without naming, tagging or organising
them and the average quality of shot reduced. I'd like it to move back towards
a quality over quantity mentality.

Hopefully the animated gif group invitation comments will be disabled at some
point too.

~~~
fma
It's a bad direction for average users (not average professional photographer
but average users).

Their mobile app has a sync process and touts it as a way to backup your
photos. Synced photos are automatically marked as private and has NO impact on
your desire of quality over quantity.

Flickr has offered free 1TB for a long time. Archival of mobile photos is the
intended feature and you are shaming users for using it?

If they want to wall off average Joe from the pros, fine. It's their right.
But they should not delete old photos. Storage is cheap. There's going to be
lots of unhappy people when they log in a few years from now to find photos of
some deceased family and realize SmugMug deleted them.

When SmugMug acquired Flickr my only comment on the article was in regards to
the free 1TB
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16888876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16888876))
as I was afraid it works be on the chopping block. But I never imagined they
would be as 'smug' as to delete old photos.

I will likely download the photos and stick them in Amazon Glacier or
something. As far as the rest of the users who are not tech savvy, best of
luck to them.

~~~
jl6
> Storage is cheap

It’s cheaper than it used to be, but it’s not so cheap that you can give away
a free terabyte of it to millions of users. The announcement explicitly calls
out that storage is a huge cost for them.

~~~
dingaling
Yet they give free storage to Flickr Commons institutions ( British Library
etc ) who have literally hundreds of millions of images. They have been
exempted from this new policy.

This is just a shakedown against the little people using photos that they
uploaded in compliance with ToS as blackmail. It's not just the damage it will
do to the Internet that is the problem, it is the ethical question. Do you
still trust Flickr as a custodian? What happens if you let your Pro account
lapse?

Imagine if GMail announced that they were restricting accounts to 1000 emails
and deleting the rest. Would anyone trust them after that?

I'm well under the new limit but will be migrating to another service, and
will be paying for it.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
This is a nightmare for our digital history. Millions of valuable photos could
disappear for good from the public Internet because of corporate greed. It
seems very irresponsible of Flickr not to grandfather older accounts to avoid
mass destruction of history.

~~~
ashelmire
> corporate greed

Is this greed? Data storage, backups, etc, all cost money. They don't have to
allow free accounts at all. That's not greed, it's good business. Do you give
away space in your refrigerator to everyone around the world?

~~~
fma
If I once promised to keep your food in my fridge, I'll keep it there. If it's
running out of space I will limit your new food.

I won't throw your food away that I once promised to keep!

If I sell the fridge to a new owner, of course they can do whatever they want.
Throwing away old food that was promised to be kept is the corporate greed
part.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
What if you haven't seen or had any contact from 90% of the owners of said
food since it was placed there?

~~~
fma
That's a different scenario. Then they can throw away food for owners that
don't use the fridge. But they are throwing away food of active owners.

------
timonoko
I pruned from 1400 pics to 700 within an hour. That was remarkably painless.
Quality improved also. Flickr is once again useless for photo storage. It is
now only good for advertising Google Photo Albums.

I did not believe the 1 Terabyte promise to begin with. I dumped my 300
thousand pics into Google Photos instead. Google seems to have more processing
power too, as everyday I get suggestions for Google-generated panoramas and
videos and other shit.

~~~
w0m
You pay monthly for google photo storage then i take it or did they change
their retention policies significantly?

~~~
timonoko
What? Google Photos has two storage settings: "High quality" and "Original
quality". High quality includes unlimited photo and video storage for photos
up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution.

The "High quality" is free and I am totally happy with it. Never even seen a
16 megapixel camera and most of my videos are of VHS-quality.

------
Terretta
Yesterday’s thread didn’t seem to read far enough down the post to note that
97% of free accounts are not past the limit and thus would not have photos
deleted, also suggesting essentially all try-before-buy users will not feel
constrained.

~~~
patates
What if 90% of the links shared on the internet are from those 3%? It would be
a huge link-rot. I really hope the internet archive has the most linked ones.

~~~
PuffinBlue
I'm still a little conflicted over link rot. On the one hand it seems fun and
cool and even amazing to be able to dive back into so much history 'live' as
it was/has always been.

It's maybe even culturally important to try and maintain it.

But then some is just a bit crap, a bit like there used to be a bit of a crap
building and then a new one got built that was better and did better things
for more people more cheaply and environmentally friendly than before. Why
save the old building? Just 'because'? Hmm, not sure about that.

So is it really worth saving everything? Is it actually irresponsible to save
everything, given the power costs (something has to physically hold the data
and be powered)?

I'm not really sure but it seems certain it's not an obvious black and white,
good/bad, one way or the other type matter.

------
tbyehl
I hate to see 80% of my old photos going back to 2005 disappear from their
original URLs... but I don't hate it enough to pay $50/yr forever. If I could
pay them $100 today to freeze my account forever and never have to think about
Flickr ever again, that would be great.

~~~
izacus
Unfortunately, "forever" is a really long time to keep the disks full of
content spinning, drawing power and requiring replacements.

~~~
ghaff
TBH, expecting Smugmug--which for all the photos it hosts is a small business
--to be the stewards of this commons "forever" is just kicking the can down
the road. They could grandfather everything and just restrict future uploads
(and maybe they should have depending on the financials) and the day would
have come when a change of ownership or financial distress would have brought
the whole issue up again.

------
jmcphers
I'm a heavy Flickr user, with 14 years and ~200GB of data on the service right
now. My usage pattern is mostly that of "convenient backup of every photo"; my
phone auto-uploads to Flickr and I meticulously upload everything worth
keeping from my DSLR, too.

I was once a Pro user, but after they announced 1TB for free users, I let my
Pro status lapse. I'm not a pro photographer and care mostly about backing up
my photos, making them convenient for me to access, and sharing them privately
with friends and family. The 1TB limit gave me plenty of room for that.

At $50 a year, if you take a lot of photos, Pro seems like a no-brainer. Even
the cheaper cloud storage options, like Backblaze, would charge me ~$50 a year
to store my 200GB (and growing) photo library. (I'm intentionally discounting
options like Glacier that don't allow me to browse full resolution photos at
any time.) You also get a mobile app that makes browsing and sharing your
photos easy, and tools like "Guest Pass" for making private photo links that
don't require Flickr logins.

All that said, there's a large part of me that wants to get off the Flickr
treadmill (every two or three years they get bought and/or change prices and
limitations) and just self-host. It seems like it'd be relatively easy to make
a static site generator that could be pointed at a huge pile of original
photos and metadata to produce a nice-looking responsive website of galleries,
but I've never seen one that didn't look like a toy. Does anyone use something
like this?

~~~
matthiaswh
I haven't used any of these yet to say if they meet your criteria or if they
are worth using, but here are a handful of potential options that I snagged
from my bookmark list.

\- [https://photoprism.org/](https://photoprism.org/)

\- [http://koken.me/](http://koken.me/)

\- [https://lychee.electerious.com/](https://lychee.electerious.com/)

\-
[https://github.com/thumbsup/thumbsup](https://github.com/thumbsup/thumbsup)
(believe this one is actually a static site generator)

\- [https://chevereto.com/](https://chevereto.com/)

\- [https://piwigo.org/](https://piwigo.org/)

------
SnaKeZ
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.

------
tyingq
Not surprising. Every notable "free" image upload site has either folded, or
introduced some behavior to hinder using it as free image hosting. There's
just no business model there.

Some sort of browser support for an image format that allows for one, small,
clickable, link in a fixed position could make it viable. I suppose, though,
it would just get hijacked by spammers and become useless.

------
wowamit
Focus on the pro market might be what is required to bring the service in
discussion. Community of pro-photographers that uses the service to showcase
their portfolio might be what they are going after. If 97% of free accounts
have less than 1000 photos as they claim [1], it might be a good cutoff to
set.

Just wonder on two fronts, will they continue to sell ads? And will it
continue to remain a Yahoo property (given they would not need a Yahoo id to
login).

[1]: [https://blog.flickr.net/en/2018/11/01/changing-flickr-
free-a...](https://blog.flickr.net/en/2018/11/01/changing-flickr-free-
accounts-1000-photos/)

~~~
KineticLensman
> will it continue to remain a Yahoo property

No, and it isn't now. Flickr was recently acquired by SmugMug - a paid-for
gallery hosting site [0]. It's SmugMug that is driving this change, not Oath /
Yahoo.

[0] [https://www.smugmug.com/](https://www.smugmug.com/)

~~~
wowamit
Ah. I had completely forgotten that Flickr was acquired by SmugMug and had
been their property - makes much more sense. Of course, I doubt if Yahoo can
run anything any longer.

That brand has faced such a horrible downfall - it was a shining example of
the power of Web.

~~~
iscrewyou
You mean if Verizon can run anything any longer. Verizon would probably nuke
Flickr if they still had it.

------
mtkd
Jim Weirich has 1,322 photos in his Flickr account.

~~~
spion
For those that don't know, Jim Weirich was a well known software engineer in
the Ruby community. He passed away in 2014.

(Hopefully this will prevent the downvotes)

~~~
danso
Discussion thread from 2014 fwiw:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7270891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7270891)

------
KineticLensman
I posted this news on a general chat forum on the PurplePort portfolio hosting
site (aimed primarily at photographers and models, usually NSFW). PurplePort
users include a large community of active photographers, and I thought the
discussion might be enlightening. So, in a totally unscientific study, their
responses mainly fall into the following categories:

\- I’d better upgrade my Flickr membership to keep my pictures

\- I already deleted my account because Flickr doesn’t materially benefit my
photography (e.g. in getting work)

\- So it is worth being a Pro member after all

\- I haven’t used my Flickr account for ages because Yahoo locked it

Compared with the discussion here, no-one got heated about the link rot issue.

------
rythie
My dad died a few years ago, he was a keen flickr user and member of many
groups, so we kept his account alive. Fortunately, it looks like he just over
the 1000 limit, so we just have to prune 100 or so photos.

------
melicerte
What is problematic for me with the new flickr proposal is this:

\- 4500 photos

\- 2.1 % of the 1 Tb storage used.

So basically, I have to remove 3500 photos while I don't consume that much
size. Or go the paid way...

------
stewartm
"Second, you can tell a lot about a product by how it makes money. Giving away
vast amounts of storage creates data that can be sold to advertisers, with the
inevitable result being that advertisers’ interests are prioritized over
yours. ...."

So I fork out $50/yr and Flickr will stop flogging my data to advertisers or,
will grow a very specific group of users, whos data is more valuable to
advertisers than the general free membership .... and Flickr will then flog
that to advertisers at a premium?

I would have preferred to see improvements to Flickr before a push to
subscriptions. My guess is that for the money I can find much better
established services, tho in fairness I have not looked, so may be wrong on
that. I guess I am about to find out.

~~~
superkuh
They chose this model because it is what they were already doing as smugmug
(who just bought twitter). Any reasoning is just rationalization.

~~~
jzawodn
Smugmug bought Flickr, not Twitter.

~~~
superkuh
Oops. Yeah, obviously that's what I meant. I was working on twitter scraping
perl scripts at the time.

------
sct202
I think that Smugmug needs to explain the differentiation between Smugmug
versus Flickr, because it seems like this first step of reducing free users is
going to make Flickr just a less customizable version of Smugmug.

~~~
PuffinBlue
> I think that Smugmug needs to explain the differentiation between Smugmug
> versus Flickr

Perhaps. Personally I'm not sure they do need to particularly do that though.
Smugmug is a place to backup and showcase your photos as an individual. It's a
portfolio service. There's not much community there really.

Flickr was a community for high quality photography. They talk at great length
in the post about how it lost it's way and want to get back to the community
and quality aspect.

If anything I'd say they're talking about the right stuff - how they're going
to make Flickr great again.

~~~
bad_user
The reason Flickr has had a big community of photographers is because it was
free and virtually unlimited, so people could back up entire albums and then
share them. That's one big reason.

Flickr is a giant database of photos that will now disappear from the web. In
terms of the actual community, the groups themselves have always been full of
spam and the discussions pretty dumb to be honest, what has always been great
being the photos themselves.

~~~
PuffinBlue
Not really sure I agree with any of that. Flickr was one of the first movers,
so it got a lot of traction and community because of the time and place it was
created in. Not just because it was free.

Flickr to me was best when there were pretty tight upload limits, so the early
days were by no means 'unlimited'. And I think there were limits even then to
how many photos you could see as a free account. That goes back a long way now
but I was around back then and the groups were pretty vibrant and people
actually discussed things.

If anything, the groups went to shit as more and more uninvested people piled
in dumping more and more photos just to chase likes - mostly thanks to limits
being relaxed.

I think it got even worse with the redesign and the 1TB limit. Especially as
the new Pro accounts were limited too! That was nuts. At least that's what I
remember and why I left. Seems now unlimited is actually unlimited again.

Thankfully Instagram can now fulfil that need and hopefully putting up a
barrier to entry will cut out the hoards who aren't interested in the
community.

~~~
bad_user
Before the 1 TB, I remember the upload limits to be 300 MB. Given the image
sizes back then, it would have taken you 3 months to reach the current limits.

Also the yearly subscription for removing the limits was dirt cheap, I
remember it being something like $20 per year.

------
Apocryphon
Two arbitrary ideas imho:

1\. I understand the two month heads up was likely made by business concerns,
but if I was to sunset this I'd give a year's warning.

2\. Don't apply this rule to accounts that have been dormant for a long time.
I can imagine photo collections on some old Blogspot account by some departed
blogger from the mid-'00s. If inactive accounts with >1000 photos don't
comprise a significant cost, why not keep those accounts? The owners of those
photos might not be in a state to upgrade to Pro anyway.

~~~
saidajigumi
This sounds like a job for The Internet Archive[1]

[1] [https://archive.org/](https://archive.org/)

------
jefe_
I want to be opposed to this but it does seem to make sense. Photos are large,
storage costs money. I will say deleting user content is pretty intense. What
about people who are dead? Seems odd their photos will be deleted.

------
gpvos
Discussed yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18354066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18354066)
.

------
elyrly
For the savers - You can use this code FLICKRPRO30 to reduce the price from
$49.99 to $34.99

------
anilgulecha
Is this something the Archive.org team would be interested in preserving?

~~~
icebraining
The ArchiveTeam already has a tool to archive Flickr photos; if you have some
bandwidth and storage you can help: [https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/flickr-
grab](https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/flickr-grab)

------
lambic
Did anyone even come close to using their full terabyte?

~~~
ghaff
I'm sure some did but 1TB is almost unlimited unless you're uploading
automatically-taken images or something like that. I've been using Flickr for
years and have uploaded almost 6,000 images (a small portion of my snaps but
still a lot) and I'm only using about 31GB.

