Flickr to cut free limit to 1000 pictures

This might affect some of the members on here who use Flickr to upload pictures for sharing. Basically from next year the limit for free accounts to 1000 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

Free users with more than 1,000 photos or videos will have until January 8th, 2019, to upgrade to Pro or download their surplus content. After January 8th, free users with over 1,000 pictures or videos won’t be able to upload any more. And on February 5th, 2019, free accounts that are still over the limit will have their content actively deleted until they’re back under 1,000 (starting with the oldest content first)

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https://www.theverge.com/platform/a...ree-accounts-changes-pro-subscription-smugmug

I believe they have also hiked the cost of a "pro" membership to $49.99 a year

Kite159 said:

This might affect some of the members on here who use Flickr to upload pictures for sharing. Basically from next year the limit for free accounts to 1000 photos.



https://www.theverge.com/platform/a...ree-accounts-changes-pro-subscription-smugmug

I believe they have also hiked the cost of a "pro" membership to $49.99 a year

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Not exactly happy about that.
Does anyone know of any good free hosting sites?

I'm also not happy about it.

Many years ago I used to use fotopic.net. They used to charge a fixed one-off payment (from memory I think for each 250MB of storage space), but there were no monthly fees or anything (I think free accounts were limited to 100MB). I'd paid this quite a few times to increase the space. Then they suddenly went bust and I lost all the storage I'd paid for and my photos disappeared.

Then I moved to flickr. I think from memory the 200 limit was a bit different. I believe back then there was actually no upload limit, but only the most recent 200 photos were visible (but older photos were still stored). I used to pay for a Pro account to essentially remove the limit on only showing the most recent 200.

Then Yahoo basically removed these limits, gave everyone 1TB of space and no quantity limit, so I stopped paying (I think the only benefit of paying was detailed statistics, which I was not interested in). I'm sure I was far from alone in taking that decision. I always thought that was a somewhat bizarre move by Yahoo to keep trying to sell Pro accounts whilst making the most important benefit of these accounts free - so I'm not entirely surprised about this change.

What I am sad about is they are now planning to delete old photos if you don't pay for Pro and you have more than 1000. I'm sure in the past (before the free 1TB in 2013) they were very up front that if your Pro membership lapsed they would NOT delete anything and all your photos would become visible again if you became a Pro member again.

There will be a lot of interesting photos from now dormant accounts lost when this change comes in (and perhaps if users let their "pro" membership lapse). I'll probably pay up and become a Pro member again though I'm always a bit wary of paying for "cloud storage" given I've previously done this only to find the company goes bust .... and your photos disappear (and even if you have a local copy, it will take a long long time to upload tag and caption them all elsewhere). Flickr is showing I currently have 48,547 photos and I can't imagine how long it would take to upload that many somewhere else (and caption them, tag them, and so on).

Was far from pleased when this popped up on my F.B wall.

I get that like every other business, Flickr has to make money in order to survive. But this 'upgrade your account by a certain date or your images will be deleted' nonsense is hardly going to encourage folk to hop over to the Pro side of the fence (a fence on which I'm presently perched). Some are either going to download their excess content and/or jump ship. Shall be keeping a very close eye on this, whatever route I personally decide to take (upgrade, download all images and/or close my account).

Kite159 said:

I believe they have also hiked the cost of a "pro" membership to $49.99 a year

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$49.99 might be a hike in the Flickr sense but you'd struggle to get a website hosting company for less. For example, Go Daddy are currently running a deal for £2.99 p/m for their Economy package and for that you get one website with 100Gb storage but only at that price if you sign up (and pay for) 36 months. Otherwise it is £5.99 p/m. Plus then I presume you may have to pay or obtain your website software and design your site, and the hosting charge does not include an SSL certificate either.

So whilst $49.99 may seem a lot, it is not in the grand scheme of things at just over $4.15 per month

These "free" services were all built around advertising revenue. People simply don't click on ads the way that they used to and with ad blockers often don't even see them. I used to be able to fund a small music website through a combination of Google advertising and Amazon associate links. These days I am lucky to earn enough to cover the fee for the domain name.

I have had a pro account for years. It is something like £38 per year and my pro membership doesn't lapse until 2020. It is less expensive than my amazon account which is my primary cloud storage tool. I suspect it is less expensive than arranging similar storage and display facilities elsewhere.

To be honest I only use it to create a link to post pictures on here as opposed to using it as a storage facility, this is done elsewhere. I assume I will be able to find alternative (free) sites that I can use for this purpose?

Geezertronic said:

$49.99 might be a hike in the Flickr sense but you'd struggle to get a website hosting company for less. For example, Go Daddy are currently running a deal for £2.99 p/m for their Economy package and for that you get one website with 100Gb storage but only at that price if you sign up (and pay for) 36 months. Otherwise it is £5.99 p/m. Plus then I presume you may have to pay or obtain your website software and design your site, and the hosting charge does not include an SSL certificate either.

So whilst $49.99 may seem a lot, it is not in the grand scheme of things at just over $4.15 per month

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And what's to stop them increasing it again next year knowing that some people will feel forced to pay for it to keep their pictures online?

The title should be changed to reflect that fact that the limit of pictures is only to be limited to 1000 pictures if you don't have a pro account. Flickr are not imposing a 1000 picture limit on everyone.

Kite159 said:

And what's to stop them increasing it again next year knowing that some people will feel forced to pay for it to keep their pictures online?

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then, surely, you reassess if you are prepared to pay. If you aren't, don't. This is the same as any service you buy. Is that not obvious?

DarloRich said:

The title should be changed to reflect that fact that the limit of pictures is only to be limited to 1000 pictures if you don't have a pro account. Flickr are not imposing a 1000 picture limit on everyone.

then, surely, you reassess if you are prepared to pay. If you aren't, don't. This is the same as any service you buy. Is that not obvious?

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The word "Free" is in there, which shows it relates to the free account options rather than for the Pro account?

Kite159 said:

And what's to stop them increasing it again next year knowing that some people will feel forced to pay for it to keep their pictures online?

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DarloRich said:

then, surely, you reassess if you are prepared to pay. If you aren't, don't. This is the same as any service you buy. Is that not obvious?

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Quite right. If the cost becomes prohibitively expensive to use the service, switch to another provider or host yourself (via an option such as Go-Daddy as I mentioned above, although there will be other associated costs as well). Personally I think that $49.99 p/a is cheap - I am sure an annual subscription of Microsoft Office is more expensive, Xbox Live is £35 p/a

cactustwirly said:

Not exactly happy about that.
Does anyone know of any good free hosting sites?

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If you don't mind slightly reduced quality then Google Photos offers unlimited storage up to a certain size

Well 1 seperate account for every 1.000 pictures or does Flickr notice that?

Groningen said:

Well 1 seperate account for every 1.000 pictures or does Flickr notice that?

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That's what I'm considering, will be interesting to see if they have anything in place to stop it.

It's the loss of historic images that I don't like - Flickr is currently a fantastic resource for transport pictures, a lot of them will be lost for ever!

No an expert, but think that if all IP adresses are the same alarm at Flickr go off. Reminds me of Whatsapp after being taken over by Facebook there is a chance that you get advertisments.

i know people with a couple of accounts. I doubt they have ever checked.

Geezertronic said:

Personally I think that $49.99 p/a is cheap - I am sure an annual subscription of Microsoft Office is more expensive, Xbox Live is £35 p/a

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Agreed

I read that the current (free) limit is 1 TB. I also read that all pictures are deleted and that you have to load up for a 2nd time. Not sure if you are already paying.

Groningen said:

I read that the current (free) limit is 1 TB. I also read that all pictures are deleted and that you have to load up for a 2nd time. Not sure if you are already paying.

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From what I can gather for current free users who have more than a thousand pictures uploaded. If they decide not to pay up they won't be able to upload any more pictures from a date in January with older pictures getting deleted from a date in February to bring the account to 1000 pictures.

Currently the limit for free users is 1TB which can be a lot of pictures

1 person on Twitter talks about Lightroom as an alternative. For what is worth.

Geezertronic said:

Personally I think that $49.99 p/a is cheap - I am sure an annual subscription of Microsoft Office is more expensive, Xbox Live is £35 p/a

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Office 365 is more expensive, I pay £7.99 a month for my subscription (it's £79.99 if paid annually). I only bought it because my partner wanted it for her university assignments, otherwise I'd have kept using an earlier version of Office.

I would pay to upgrade my Flickr account, but I don't use it enough at the moment.

I'm a pro user (and no renewal until 2020 yay) but i think the 1000 photo limit is the wrong way to do it, someone could upload 100 massive photos and use far more storage than someone who had uploaded 1000s of smaller images over the years. I think the limit would be much better if it was storage used.

Kite159 said:

And what's to stop them increasing it again next year knowing that some people will feel forced to pay for it to keep their pictures online?

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That’s a risk of cloud hosting. I’m looking at cloud stuff in a progressional capacity fully aware that it’s the ‘free/cheap drugs syndrome’ where the prices could increase in the future

I wouldn't worry about IP addresses.
Those with a static address - how does Flickr know it isn't a family who all have their own accounts?
Best thing to do is sign up to outlook.com email.
Then find in the settings about Alias addresses. You can create up to 10. Then use all these emails to sign up to Flickr.
The hassle is having to sign in and out of each account. Too much effort for me, but perhaps not for others.

The_Train said:

To be honest I only use it to create a link to post pictures on here as opposed to using it as a storage facility, this is done elsewhere. I assume I will be able to find alternative (free) sites that I can use for this purpose?

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Just type in "free image hosting" to a search engine for temporary images.

I wouldn't ever rely on free hosting from a company.
I have backups hosted (free) with Microsoft and Gmail because I have accounts with them. But I also have those backups elsewhere offline.

Just like companies that have disappeared, I wouldn't store my treasured albums on a free service.

507021 said:

Office 365 is more expensive, I pay £7.99 a month for my subscription (it's £79.99 if paid annually). I only bought it because my partner wanted it for her university assignments, otherwise I'd have kept using an earlier version of Office.

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She should check her university doesn't supply free "Student" access to Office 365.
Mine did, and I am still able to use it to this day.

If she has a university email address, find the "Office 365 Student" area of the Office site and sign in (using her Uni credentials). If she can sign in, she can get Office free.

trash80 said:

I'm a pro user (and no renewal until 2020 yay) but i think the 1000 photo limit is the wrong way to do it, someone could upload 100 massive photos and use far more storage than someone who had uploaded 1000s of smaller images over the years. I think the limit would be much better if it was storage used.

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I agree with you there, having a free Flickr account myself.

Crossover said:

That’s a risk of cloud hosting. I’m looking at cloud stuff in a progressional capacity fully aware that it’s the ‘free/cheap drugs syndrome’ where the prices could increase in the future

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I have flickr, amazon cloud, PC hard drive and external hard drive storage for my pictures. Hopefully that is enough redundancy

I'm a bit confused. Assuming that the storage space taken up matters more to service providers than the number of photos stored, why has the limit changed from 1 TB to 1000 photos instead of, say, 10GB?

When I bought my Google pixel 2xl smart phone, I got unlimited cloud storage with Google Photos. All my hi Res photos and images are stored at Photos and deleted from my device so I don't have to worry about space.
Someone mentioned hosting, Digital Ocean offer Block Storage Volumes at 10gb = 1$ then 100GB = 10$ per month but you do need a server to connect the volume to (cheapest is additional $5 per month)

TommyL4 said:

I'm a bit confused. Assuming that the storage space taken up matters more to service providers than the number of photos stored, why has the limit changed from 1 TB to 1000 photos instead of, say, 10GB?

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Not because of cost to them, but because of their business model. Smugmug's business model is as a paid service. Allowing 1000 photos for free, which isn't many even for family snaps[1], is a reasonable "try before you buy" level. The intention is that most people will either buy or decide it isn't for them and go away.

[1] My Pictures folder on my PC, which includes all my photographs right back to birth as I had the paper ones scanned, is 95.7GB and just short of 48,000 photographs. A photography enthusiast is going to have many, many more than that.