So, I used to be a huge user of Flickr for photos, I would check it daily and comment and join communities and pretty much posted every photo I had taken there. Over time I sort of fell out of the habit of using it. This wasn’t over Instagram or anything, I didn’t join Instagram until much later, something just sort of became less compelling about it. I still kept up my subscription though. The annual $25 fee is pretty small and it let me keep a backup of all of my photos. I even posted all of my family photos there though they are listed as private. I’m talking some tens of thousands of photos, though my profile suggests only around 3500 are publicly available.
I feel like things started to take a turn downhill when Yahoo changed the way Flickr accounts worked. I wasn’t really affected, being a paid user and all, but it seems like the addition of ads and whatnot for free users kind of helped kill some of the community. This wasn’t helped by Instagram coming up in popularity, even if i hadn’t started using IG, others had, which only further hurt the community. Having been a paid user since 2006. I was able to keep paying for my account at the grandfathered rate of $25/year.
Recently Flickr was bought by SmugMug. I don’t use SmugMug, though I don’t really have anything against them. Hell, Yahoo has pretty much been ignoring Flickr for a while, SmugMug can only improve it.
Or possibly not.
It’s been recently announced that free accounts will be limited to 1000 photos max, and that any photos over that number will be deleted. This is definitely a rough change from previous, which I believe was 1TB of storage. This wouldn’t affect me, as a paid user, except that Flickr has stopped honoring the old grandfathered subscription rate. Renewals now renew at current rates, which I believe is $50/year. This isn’t a lot, I admit, but frankly, as little as I use Flickr, it feels like too much. I also feel that for the same price, I could buy into something like One Drive or Google Drive and get a lot more functionality out of the storage, in addition to Photo storage.
Granted, not everyone uses Yahoo as a photo backup, some people use it for business, and for the community, which is fine. In my case, the new plans just don’t work. So I find I must say good bye to Flickr, for the most part. I’ve started deleting out the old backup photos. Once that’s done, I’ll prune out the rest to under 1000 photos. I haven’s actually use Flickr for backup for a few years now, so it’s not even current anyway. Pretty much the only thing posted there new is just a mirror of my Instagram anyway. It kind of feels bad to clear everything out, but sometimes it’s just better to move on. I’m just sad to see something I used to really enjoy, fall away.