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.
As Flickr explains in its press release announcing the change, “Unfortunately, ‘free’ services are seldom actually free for users. Users pay with their data or with their time. We would rather the arrangement be transparent.” It makes a certain amount of sense — servers aren’t free, after all — but for free users with more than 1,000 photos, it’s not ideal news.
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).
Flickr is also adding numerous changes and enhancements to the $49.99-per-year Flickr Pro service over the course of the next few months. Paid customers will be given unlimited storage for photos and videos at full resolution, no ads, additional data on how their photos are performing, “premier” customer service, videos up to 10 minutes long (instead of three minutes), and partner discounts from Adobe, Smugmug, Peak Design, and more.
To sweeten the deal for any free holdouts, Flickr is also offering a 30 percent discount off of the first year of Flickr Pro through November 30th, which may help ease the sting of losing that free storage space.
In what may be the nicest quality-of-life change, starting in January, all users — paid and free — won’t have to use Yahoo to log in to Flickr anymore.
Comments
I started my account without Yahoo and it’s nice to know it’s going back to being Yahoo free.
By Alain-Christian on 11.01.18 11:36am
Welp RIP Flickr as my 6th backup solution
By mr_duong567 on 11.01.18 11:40am
Remember when wifi SD cards used to be popular?
I paid $25 for a Flickr Pro Account. I needed to pay to enable direct uploads from my EyeFi sd card to my flickr account. Back in 2013 when flickr started offering 1TB free, they also allowed free users to upload from EyeFi devices. So, I stopped renewing my flickr subscription. Later in 2016, Eye-Fi hit the remote kill switch on all cards sold prior to 2015. lol
By thatdecade on 11.01.18 11:55am
Well, I was thinking of using Flickr as storage for photos on my website. Oh well
By lsnus on 11.01.18 12:07pm
I genuinely appreciate their candor about the whole thing, honestly. Lots of companies would just gloss over it or try to make the change super quietly without having to be confronted or anything.
By Nellko Agogo on 11.01.18 12:12pm
See people bemoan advertisements or tracking, but the minute that compensation is traded for something more tangible like dollars they have a fit.
By My Only Name Change on 11.01.18 12:15pm
When people complain about companies mining their "precious data" for money, we can now point out how much that data is actually worth: 1000 photos.
By Dante of the Inferno on 11.01.18 12:30pm
Yes, but those same 1,000 photos are worth 1,000,000 words.
By badasscat1 on 11.01.18 2:39pm
They’re worth way more now, but that’s splitting hairs.
By Dante of the Inferno on 11.01.18 3:21pm
Noooo just noticed they’re deleting old photos! This is terrible from an archive perspective, I have found so many interesting things from Flickr. I’m sure the Creative Commons ones will be saved, but the rest will be gone
By lsnus on 11.01.18 12:36pm
Jokes on them, I’m going to convert my photos into 1000 × 1Gb collages so my 1Tb of storage remains intact.
By britinsb on 11.01.18 1:00pm
I would just create more accounts.
By shakil314 on 11.01.18 3:32pm
Isn’t it 1024?
By Nuttygamer on 11.02.18 12:58pm
I wonder when youtube will do the same thing.
It’s like there’s a bottomless pit of endless petabytes of which to throw files that nobody will ever look at again.
By theeht10 on 11.01.18 1:29pm
In the past I wondered, will we reach a point where most stored content isn’t ever accessed and big companies will need to delete it. But then generally new content takes up more space, so as more and more 4K video is created all the old standard definition videos that nobody watches become insignificant
By lsnus on 11.01.18 1:45pm
YouTube makes the highest percentage of profit (100%!) from small channels who aren’t allowed to monetize. They make the smallest percentage (though the highest dollar amount) from the largest channels.
So the real question with YouTube is not "when will randos stop being able to upload videos for free", it’s "when will top YouTubers finally reach a tipping point where YouTube decides to take too much of their money". And we’ve been seeing that play out for years now.
In other words, random people uploading videos for free is a steady stream of revenue for YouTube that doesn’t cause them any problems. But what they’re really after is more of the money their biggest talents make. (And the biggest problems come in with those in the middle ranges who get disproportionately hit by the changes YouTube tries to make to slice off another half a percent of revenue from the top people.)
By badasscat1 on 11.01.18 2:44pm
YouTube doesn’t put ads on non-monetized videos, except when those videos include music or video not owned by the uploader. So YouTube actually is not profiting at all from most of the small channels that don’t monetize.
By balazer on 11.01.18 3:31pm
As balazer pointed out, it’s actually a pretty big pain in the ass to monitize a channel and without it no ads will be shown. Of course that doesn’t mean that content isn’t valuable. In case you haven’t noticed, YouTube videos are like Lay’s potato chips. Nobody can eat just one.
And it also helps that youtube will automatically load the next one and the next one on to infinity and you can bet those videos will be monitized.
But there are videos and pictures that aren’t even public just taking up space forever. It’s like a cemetery. Files get buried and never viewed again
By theeht10 on 11.01.18 6:45pm
W-wait a minute. $50?? It was $25 before. I have a few nasty words to say, but I won’t say them here.
By Nerdferkel on 11.01.18 3:30pm
$50 a year isn’t bad for unlimited storage of photos and videos (if they’re short enough). It’s not amazing or anything, but not bad, especially for those with a ton of them.
By GoodTroll on 11.01.18 4:26pm
Is anyone else having issues getting the discount rate… showing as $49.99 for me, I try and apply the promo code "FLICKRPRO30" but it says invalid…. so I am not getting the $35.04 ($2.92) price…
By liamdaly on 11.01.18 6:16pm
Those cretins. Restricted down to only 1000 photos? Bye Flickr.
Now I’m gonna have to find another image archival service. I’m not gonna pay $50 for that, are you crazy?
By gommerthus on 11.01.18 6:40pm
Maybe took ordinary cloud service route instead? (Gdrive, iCloud, etc.) Low price, enormous storage(for images), and not going anywhere anytime soon. It’s not pretty but it works.
By uteki on 11.01.18 11:36pm
So does Flickr now use the same backend infrastructure as Smugmug?
By beq on 11.04.18 12:42pm
RIP Flickr. There are lots of other free portfolio sites. I will leave Flickr after 13 years.
By Jan Kiek on 11.07.18 7:16am