(Also looks like there's a missing </ul> on that limits page, there.)
Edit: Looks like the page is being edited right this moment - the page used to list the 300MB/month limit but was also mentioning the new account types, at the same time. Guess they forgot to review all the text
So 1 TB is free, but an extra 1 TB is $500/yr?! I'm not sure I understand that.
On another note, I (surprisingly) like how the disemvoweling is becoming synonymous with the Yahoo brand (with Tumblr now as well). What seemed stale is starting to seem fresh again. Playful, almost, like a wink to Web 2.0 -- though I imagine it could be perceived as being out of touch too, if they don't play it right.
roughly, very roughly - 90%+ of the people on the 1 TB plan will likely use < 20 Gigabytes (at least over the next couple years), and probably 99% will use less than 100 gigabytes, whereas close to 100% of the people on the doublr plan will be using at least 1 Terabyte.
Completely agree. This is similar to shared host that offer unlimited space. For those using a lot of share/cpu, they'll get a friendly reminder to upgrade, then a notice that they can't continue supporting them as a client with their current plan.
The Flickr Pro account 24.95/yr for "unlimited storage" was an easy purchase. When you login with your Pro account you are suggested to downgrade to the new 1TB (ad) account.
For 49.99/yr I have to ask myself, do I really need this ? what are my other options.
As a current Pro user, $25 per year to continue unlimited storage, no ads (for me and for all viewing my photos) and photo statistics is still an easy sell.
However, if I were signing up for an account today, I would most likely not purchase a paid account - my main reason for paying for an account was to get past the "only your last 200 photos are visible" limitation. That said, if I actually used my flickr account for business purposes, I would not hesitate to pay $50 per year to remove ads from my photos. I suspect many professionals would agree.
best explanation of their pricing structure yet. What's stopping people from creating multiple accounts and use flickr as a cloud backup system for free?
Nothing will stop them - but, (and I'm just guessing here) - the type of people who host more than one terabyte of photos on flickr probably don't want to screw around with multiple accounts - tracking your detailed stats, alone, gets to be a hassle with multiple accounts. Obviously some people will - but I'm guessing those will be few enough not to matter.
The bulk of the people who want to host 2 Terabytes of Photos will be fine paying $500/year, those who aren't can create multiple accounts. (Those who just want Local+Cloud backups are probably better served by just buying a 2 TB Hard Drive for $90, and backing up with backblaze for $50/year
I agree anyone seriously wanting to host that many photos will not want to split accounts, but FWIW statistics (current Pro feature) don't seem to be offered at all any more.
Agreed that this is why Yahoo is pricing it this way -- but I imagine it won't stop the pricing feeling "wrong" to many people. "Why should I pay $500 a year for just a little bit more than I what I was getting for free?"
I would imagine, at that price point, it would drive people to use multiple accounts despite the irritation -- and that ultimately, because of that irritation, they might leave the service. Not a good situation for anyone.
I would imagine the people that need more than 1TB would be professional photographers who use flickr as a portfolio / advertising.
If you are such a heaver user that you need more than 1TB of space, you are unlikely to want to split your account into two and your would probably be unlikely to balk at spending $500 per year on what would be for you a business service.
A while back I was getting nervous about what Yahoo was going to do with Flickr, so I signed up for a $60/ year SmugMug account.
On the technical side of things, transferring the data out of Flickr wasn't a problem at all. If I remember correctly, importing ~9000 (~42 Gb) of photos from Flickr took less than an hour, and preserved almost all of the meta-data I had in Flickr (sets, collections, tags, etc.). It was so fast I almost didn't believe it. Of course 1 Tb would take a while even at that speed.
The bigger problem is getting people to use the new site. My Mom, for example, still goes to my Flickr page.
$50/year is for the ad-free. They are talking about the two terabyte plan. The (understandable from the perspective of the consumer) cognitive dissonance is, 999 Megabytes is free, but 1001 Megabytes is $500/year. How can two things, so close to each other, be priced so differently?
It's a very, very small number of people (though they certainly exist) that have photo libraries of > 1 Terabyte. And, and an almost insignificant number of people who have 1 Terabyte of curated pictures. (I.E. Eliminating Dupes, Poor Composition, Focus/exposure issues, etc...)
Flickr as backup doesn't make sense - backblaze, at $50/year, makes a lot more sense. Perhaps this is Flickr's way of encouraging people to start using them as a curated upload site, and not as a backup of their entire photo library.
That is a random comment in a forum from someone who doesn't represent Flickr.
The actual TOS make no mention of whether you can have a business account or not. In face the best practices page specifically provides guidelines for businesses.
"This guide is intended to help organizations—such as businesses, groups and non-profits—get the most out of Flickr."
I just feel safer using Dropbox or Glacier. Flickr seems more like a social network, specialising in photos, and I wouldn't feel comfortable about using a service like that as a backup. As a business, the TOS are just not clear enough about what I can and can't store.
Community manager at Trovebox here. To go along with the other Trovebox-related reply, we're planning to start work on an iPhoto plugin for Trovebox soon because we've gotten so many requests for it.
If you're specifically looking for Flickr, a little searching shows me this page, which mentions an (unofficial) iPhoto plugin: http://www.flickr.com/tools/
The google link was just for the calculator feature, noone here's been looking at cached pages.
When I looked at the limits page it was updated to list all the new plans, but it also mentioned a 300MB/month upload limit for free accounts (in two spots, I seem to recall, but at least one, and then it was gone.)
Even though they removed the limit from the terms today, it was still active when I tried to upload images to Flickr just now. They'll probably correct that soon, still not the most trustworthy way of making this kind of announcement.
I would if I used it a lot.. Extensive ads ruin a lot of webpages to the extend that I just stay away..
Yes, I know I could use adblock etc., which helps, but the design and layout is still much worse than it could be. It's worth paying a small amount to fix sites I use a lot.
Also, it's the principle of the thing. If they can't see that their site is totally f#¤ useless and ugly, I'm not going to bother with them.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that it's not just that you don't see ads; it's also that others don't see ads on your photos. The latter can be an important feature for those who use Flickr to create professional portfolios.
The original pro account removed ads while browsing the site, Not from your pages as viewed by others. Plus a lot of the time your Photos are submitted to groups, would adds be removed every time one of your pictures turned up on the page?
Pretty sure it is not a business feature to show a clean page but a viewer option for distraction free viewing.
Anecdotally, I think it is the case that if you're a Pro user, and someone else is viewing your photostream, then they won't see ads next to your photo. This probably doesn't apply to your photos in other groups, etc. So we both may be right.
But surely they don't make $49 per user per year on ads? It looks like they're over-charging on the paid accounts to cover the costs of the free accounts. Especially the 1TB is free, 2TB is $500 deal.
And it seems that after proving people will happily pay for premium features, they've now sent an email to all their customers which essentially says unless you have over 1TB of photos with us (which is pretty-much no-one), you may as well cancel and use the free account instead.
It seems like a very bizarre structure to me and I can't see people subscribing to it which is a shame as IMHO they've just vastly improved what was already by far the best product in its market.
I'm curious to see how many people will hit that limit... the largest images I have, at about 6000 x 4000, with 48-bit floating-point pixels, using non-lossy compression, are only 80MB...
I think it's intended to distract you from the actual limit. If they came out and said "Unlimited storage" everyone's first reaction would be "What's the catch?"
Well, sort of. There's no mention of bandwidth on the new limits page, other than it was previously unlimited under Pro. They apparently haven't completely updated their FAQ page...
"Dear [name], as a Pro member continue to enjoy the benefits of unlimited space, an ad free experience and stats."
"Smile [username]. Flickr gives you one free terabyte of space. Share your photos in full resolution. See what's new
Pro members, your subscription remains the same."
The pro badge is no more, and pro accounts exist only as grandfathered in plans. You can renew an existing pro account, but those who aren't currently can't subscribe to it.
It's worth pointing out that you can't renew existing pro accounts manually, only accounts that are set up with recurring transactions will renew automatically. For some reason this doesn't include my account, as far as I can tell. I'm a little annoyed about this.
As I understand it, accounts that were originally a gift, like mine, don't get the recurring transaction treatment. This makes sense, but only up to a point, that point being where the owner of the account renews it with a different credit card and it becomes truly "theirs".
I am not sure that flickr gave this scenario due consideration, there must be a lot of people who received pro as a gift but have since paid to renew it will be unable to benefit from the reduced "grandfathered" price of $25.
I saw that - but I haven't been able to find out what price we can renew at. If it's still at $25 - every pro user in the universe will renew. If it's even $50 - for unlimited storage (versus $500/year for 2 terabytes) - still sounds like a no brainer.
I wonder if Yahoo/Flickr are really going to take that good a care of their existing pro users?
Humour me, but are you on the Flickr team? I'm seeing that page change before my very eyes, clearly as a "oh shit!" response when the discrepancies were noticed, and the cache excuse is as old as time.
It was developer humour rather than an accusation. Many of us have been in the situation where we overlooked changing something, and when it's noticed we quickly change it and attribute the original mistake to some mysterious caching issue.
The page specifically listed the new account types (free, adfree, doublr) but also mentioned that the free account was limited to 300mb/month. Maybe they forgot to change a paragraph when they published it earlier.
It is not. Some id^H^H guy saw the old limit posted before the page was updated, and tons followed to comment without pausing to think that such a limit does not make sense with the new announcement.
The page was using all the new account type names, and seemed like it was otherwise all up to date. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered posting about it. Seemed like a plausible "catch" to the generous storage limit.
It'd take 291 years to fill up the 1TB allowance: https://www.google.com/search?q=1TB+%2F+(300+MB%2Fmonth)
(Also looks like there's a missing </ul> on that limits page, there.)
Edit: Looks like the page is being edited right this moment - the page used to list the 300MB/month limit but was also mentioning the new account types, at the same time. Guess they forgot to review all the text