[Jonathan Mac]

I've never seen the benefit of a 'pro' account, since it does not increase the amount of space available and everything else offered in the 'pro' package isn't useful to me...

I wouldn't mind an annual fee for storage, as long as it actually nets me something....

Same here. I'm a big fan of Flickr for the large amount of free storage and social side but the advantages of moving to Pro are few. The only changes I can think of that would really p*ss me off would be blocking linking from external sites (a la Photobucket), a downsize of the space per user or a fee which I consider unreasonable.

We'll see what happens and I'll decide what to do if and when the changes come, but I won't worry about it in the meantime. I certainly won't be running to 500px or any other site any time soon.

[lytrytyr]

Burp!

Please cover your mouth when you do that.

[Weevil]

Being a Pro user for a while (about 6 years), and using Flickr as a central repository to share my photos, I wonder what would happen to all the photo links I shares over the last 6 years on different sites such as here, FB, other forums, etc.

Will the link break over time?

I do not know smugmug at all, may have explore it before I decided to go with flickr but reading some comments here I find the news a bit more encouraging... will wait and see how all would transform.

[Racer X 69]

Flickr has millions of users, how quickly can bulk emails be sent out?

About as quickly as a system admin can select the send all option, and then click send.


After that it the command travels at the speed of light.


186,000 miles per second.

[BrianR]

About as quickly as a system admin can select the send all option, and then click send.


After that it the command travels at the speed of light.


186,000 miles per second.

But do they all go simultaneously? This isn't cc'ing a dozen people, what are the mechanics and delays in sending 75 million emails? Any?

Another thought is they may be staggering the migration and sending notices in rounds. Mine said I had until May 25th, there might be another batch with a later date to spread out people trying to download all their photos if they plan to leave flickr.

But what do I know? I'm just expecting handling the colossal pile of information they have to move around is vastly different from my experience with my home computers

[Racer X 69]

But do they all go simultaneously? This isn't cc'ing a dozen people, what are the mechanics and delays in sending 75 million emails? Any?

Another thought is they may be staggering the migration and sending notices in rounds. Mine said I had until May 25th, there might be another batch with a later date to spread out people trying to download all their photos if they plan to leave flickr.

But what do I know? I'm just expecting handling the colossal pile of information they have to move around is vastly different from my experience with my home computers

Well the speed of light is pretty quick, but 75 million messages might take a minute or two.


And consider that moving stuff around on a home computer isn't going to be as fast as some giant server farm with thousands of computers working together. Still at the speed of light, but the speed of light times the number of machines chugging away in the server farm as opposed to one or two or three machines in the typical peer to peer home network.

[BrianR]

Well the speed of light is pretty quick, but 75 million messages might take a minute or two.

The idea of even pulling 75 million email address out of a database is mind boggling. I guess the computers involved would make a game out of it, seeing how many emails you could send in 10 seconds, then trying to beat that record.

Plus the time to lick all those electronic stamps has to add up.

[Ian Stuart Forsyth]

I used both Flicker and smugmug together and they are basically 2 different entities that offer different products.

I like flicker as a social platform (mainly for clubs and friends) while SM is photo management hosting site that offers password access for clients and a way of managing photographs I post for my own wbsite and file transfers too clients and even times for payment

I felt that SM taking over Flicker maybe not a bad idea best of both worlds social platform and as a photo management

[Racer X 69]

Plus the time to lick all those electronic stamps has to add up.

[stevebrot]

But do they all go simultaneously?

No, they queue. The slow parts are in determining the route, the negotiation with the receiving server, network latency and bandwidth (bits/second)*. Latency at each hop along with server negotiation can be considerable such that the time to send even a small message can be upwards of a full second in a non-optimized environment. Bulk e-mail providers typically have hot access to back-bone networks and significant computing power to allow adequate throughput.


Steve

* Yes, electrical impulse may pass at the speed of light, but data take much much longer.

[YeOldePentaxian]

^^^^

I was going to comment as well. After far too many years in IT infrastructure I think of E-mail as the world's biggest Rube Goldberg machine. It always surprises me that it works as reliably as it does given all the possible points of failure for any given message, let alone bulk mailings of millions.

[jpzk]

While we're on the subject ... how do I download all my pictures "out of there" ?

[RGlasel]

It always surprises me that it works as reliably as it does given all the possible points of failure for any given message, let alone bulk mailings of millions.

The reliability of email is almost entirely dependent on a liberal definition of reliable and the part that isn't dependent on semantics can be entirely explained by random events repeated millions of times. There are only two reasons why email works at all: one, recipients want to receive emails, so they actively search for valid messages and two, senders know the likelihood of their messages being read is highly dependent on using human intelligence to navigate past the automated potholes in the information highway.

In my final year of university I was part of a team doing a marketing study of Telidon, which predated Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web by a decade. I wrote that Telidon's success would depend on making large quantities of diverse information available for a fixed rate, but I never imagined what would happen when content that costs nothing to produce blankets the globe like a giant cloud of noise.

[boriscleto]

While we're on the subject ... how do I download all my pictures "out of there" ?

You Can Now Bulk Download from Flickr: Your Photos Really Do Belong to You

[jpzk]

You Can Now Bulk Download from Flickr: Your Photos Really Do Belong to You

Thanks !
BTW, the linked site (not Flickr) has produced an alert from my AV software.
So, I have just Google'd "Flickr Bulk Download" (using some of the wording from your link) and got to the "Flickr Downloader" ... as per here: flickr downloadr - Batch download your flickr photos!
Would that be the same thing?