[Nass]

How do you propose they fund their operations? You're complaining about paying. If they show advertising, people complain about having to view ads. If they sell our data to other companies, people complain about privacy. If they run on a tiny budget, we get slow servers and unfixed bugs.

Flickr is a for-profit company rather than a charity financed by donations and staffed by unpaid volunteers. Even if the corporate owners make zero profit, they have to pay software developers and other staff. The server farm needs to be paid for, whether Flickr keeps their own hardware or rents cloud space. The local utility turns off the power if bills aren't paid. Property taxes. Etc.

Agree, and I'd rather pay than have my data sold. Glad to hear they're improving service, was very much the weak point for me

[Doundounba]

What's really annoying to me is that if you upgrade (as I have), and then you ever lapse, you return to the free tier, which means they will delete all your photos beyond the most recent one thousand. I will certainly lapse eventually, at the latest after I die. I would like my images to remain online after this event, but do not think it's reasonable to expect my estate to pay into perpetuity. I really wish they would offer both

• a temporary freeze: half-price of normal service, can't upload any new images, otherwise everything normal (can still organize, favorite others' shots, contribute images to groups, etc.)
• and a deep freeze: one time payment, can't modify anything at all but no images deleted and all messages sent to a provided external email.

The deep freeze could be used by estates to ensure someone's images remain online without having to pay in perpetuity. I think it would be reasonable to offer such a deep freeze for a lump payment of two years worth of regular service.

[jacamar]

There's a good chance that many of the insects and other creatures folks like Dondounba and others on this forum are photographing won't be around in another 20 years or so. Also, the pics we take might be a reflection of our times in ways we don't understand right now so that's another good reason preserve them in some form or other.

[Not a Number]

"Some Credit" is this like the way news media use "Some Say" when they don't want to own the statement?

I believe it is actually one of Flickr's managements own blog that blames the 1 terabyte freebie for many of their problems but I was to lazy at 8 am without my coffee to search for the actual posting. It should be covered in the above discussion which is where a saw the reference to the blog in the first place.

[boriscleto]

Guess what happened when Flickr start with the one terabyte free accounts. Some credit this feature and the subsequent change of user base as Flickr's downfall.

Flickr's downfall happened when Yahoo bought it...Or was it when Yahoo shut down Yahoo Photos and deleted all the photos and told people to join Flickr...Or was it when Yahoo forced all the old Flickr users to associate their accounts with Yahoo...All of these things happened years before the site redesign and 1TB limit...

[Rondec]

What's really annoying to me is that if you upgrade (as I have), and then you ever lapse, you return to the free tier, which means they will delete all your photos beyond the most recent one thousand. I will certainly lapse eventually, at the latest after I die. I would like my images to remain online after this event, but do not think it's reasonable to expect my estate to pay into perpetuity. I really wish they would offer both

• a temporary freeze: half-price of normal service, can't upload any new images, otherwise everything normal (can still organize, favorite others' shots, contribute images to groups, etc.)
• and a deep freeze: one time payment, can't modify anything at all but no images deleted and all messages sent to a provided external email.

The deep freeze could be used by estates to ensure someone's images remain online without having to pay in perpetuity. I think it would be reasonable to offer such a deep freeze for a lump payment of two years worth of regular service.

I would question if any company would agree to do anything "in perpetuity." Certainly not for a hundred dollar fee. I wish there were some other option out there. Google and Microsoft offer a certain amount of free storage, but it isn't unlimited and they reserve the right to change it whenever they want. A few years back, Microsoft took away a good chunk of the free storage they had offered to lure new users on there. But the biggest thing is that none of those companies offers the linking capability that Flickr does.

[Doundounba]

I would question if any company would agree to do anything "in perpetuity."[...]

Come now. They are currently offering you unlimited storage for a fixed period for a given fee. This would just flip the variables: fixed storage for an unlimited period for a given fee. And in practice storage costs for a given amount of space should go down with time, and unless your name is Vivian Mayer, the bandwidth used to serve up your images should wither very quickly to next to nothing after your account is deep frozen. You can't actively change anything in your account, so you're not using up very many, if any, CPU cycles either.

I don't think it's as ridiculous as you make it sound by a long shot. They can revert me to a free account and get zero additional dollars from me or they can get a couple of year's worth of active service to deep freeze my account...

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Last edited by Doundounba; 12-11-2018 at 05:35 PM.

[Rondec]

Come now. They are currently offering you unlimited storage for a fixed period for a given fee. This would just flip the variables: fixed storage for an unlimited period for a given fee. And in practice storage costs for a given amount of space should go down with time, and unless your name is Vivian Mayer, the bandwidth used to serve up your images should wither very quickly to next to nothing after your account is deep frozen. You can't actively change anything in your account, so you're not using up very many, if any, CPU cycles either.

I don't think it's as ridiculous as you make it sound by a long shot. They can revert me to a free account and get zero additional dollars from me or they can get a couple of year's worth of active service to deep freeze my account...

I guess. I'm not saying that they can't do that. I just think 1000 photos for free or pay a yearly amount is what they've decided on as a way to generate some income. I'm sure there can be some tweaking of things in the future.

Honestly, though, if I were actively dying, I'm not sure figuring out my long term Flickr account standing would be very important on the list of things for me to set in order.

[johnha]

I have just over 900 photos on Flickr (mostly private), the rest are mostly to keep all my web linked images in one place (so I can manage them all from one central location). I don't expect to get anything 'free', despise ads (both ones I see and those inserted between my photos) and feel that paying for something raises my expectations & their responsibilities . I've upgraded, the enhanced stats are interesting (my long dormant Yahoo webmail account also seems to have started working).

At some point I'll sort out some cloud based backup (I can't see any merit in local backups), but Flickr offers an awful lot for a modest price.

[SpecialK]

I had a Photobucket account some years ago until they redesigned it into uselessness - could not sort by filename (mine all start with the date) and no one could find their own photos. I've saved some of the hate email.*

Never really liked Flickr, but signed up for $25, uploaded 15 photos as a test, and bailed because as #165 on the FAQ (really!) stated, it could not do some basic thing, at the time at least.

A member recommended SlickPic and that is where I am now. I have... "65265 Photos, 807 Albums", and 2 former followers :-) I think it might have gone up to $39 a year or something, though I think there is a limited free account and one or two levels up. My account is limited to 3 levels of folders which only affected my "museums" folder which I split into top-level Airplanes/Cars/Artsy Fartsy/Historical etc. I use the collection to post here, and occasional show-and-tell elsewhere, and a backup though I have 2 external HDs. It can be slow to load large albums.

* This is only one of them but it sums up the problem. I have heard they got better but I was long gone...

"Bravo to PhotoBucket for absolutely DEMOLISHING the site! I have never seen such certain disregard for the users of a site as this! I can't organize my photos in the manner that I would like to (date taken and title do not apply to what I use PB for!), I can't see my most recent uploads in order of uploading, plus I can't cruise through the albums in the same way that was EASY previously. I did not know that it was popular demand to have hidden links that you have seek out in order to post your photos to forums. I had no idea that "ease of use" was an atrocity to the powers that be in the PhotoBucket offices. I had no idea that "we have taken your feedback into consideration" actually meant bugger off... WE DON'T GIVE A POOP!

Congrats on being the worst photo-sharing site out there, PhotoBucket! It's pretty difficult to go from #2 to #10,000!"

[swanlefitte]

Just cut my photos down to 999. The deadline is almost here to upgrade.

[Jonathan Mac]

We have to assume that anything not saved from the grand 1000 photo cull is dross whose owner has decided it's not worth saving. I believe that in most cases that will be true.

[swanlefitte]

The msg I get is update or frozen until under 1000. It no longer says it will cut down to 1000. I think this is to save accounts for people who have died.

[swanlefitte]

this is the next mark.
February 5, 2019: Any items over the 1,000-upload limit will be at risk of deletion, starting with the oldest of the items. Photos licensed through Creative Commons before November 1, 2018 will not be deleted, even for accounts over the 1,000 limit.

[Sliver-Surfer]

I Have over 3000 images on Flickr..got to start weeding with extreme prejudice. I was trying to figure out a way to download all my photos from my Flickr account in the case I can't make the cutoff date.
Here is a video I made of how to do it. I am sure there are other ways to do it but this worked pretty quick for me and no need for 3rd party apps. I may go pro at some point but not right now.

Youtu.be

Youtu.be