I'm only about half way to 1000 photos on Flickr right now (after about 18 months of free membership) and I only use my Flickr account for sharing photos, either on this site or for family and friends, so I will continue to make the free account work for me.
Originally posted by victormeldrew
Personally, if I exceed 1000 images I would consider that a failure of curation.
The only reason I'm using Flickr for photos I've posted on this site is to make higher resolution versions available, I still have unused attachment space on Pentaxforums. When I use Flickr for sharing photos with family and friends, those photos are of interest to other people for a very short period of time, so I'm in the same boat. When I find an unsuspecting victim to show my favorite photos to, I have about 2000 images stored as JPEGs on a notebook. I back up my DNG files to a portable hard drive; if that external drive is damaged in a fire or flood to the point where none of its contents can be professionally recovered, I will have more important things to worry about.