So in summary Flickr is giving free users hosting for 1000 photos of unlimited quality vs. 1TB of free storage to refocus on photography vs. data mining for advertising. Makes sense to me.
When you look at the comments on Reddit, you can see that unfortunately it does not make sense for many people who put free as their first priority, versus privacy/sustainability/data concerns.
Very brave for Flickr to make this move and face all those critics, even if this is for the best on the long term.
I would be very careful about drawing any sort of general conclusion from self-selected Reddit users. The most entitled people are going to complain loudly but I'd be skeptical that they're a substantial percentage of the people who contribute any value to Flickr.
While they may not be a good foundation to build upon, they are good marketers. Just a roundabout way of saying adoption begets adoption and barriers are the opposite (though sometimes the trade-off is worth it as may be the case here).
I would wager Flickr stopped growing significantly a while ago, and therefore doesn't benefit from any marketing that people with free accounts might do for them.
And as the saying goes in creative industries: you can't eat "exposure." The only way to make money is the charge money, and it's generally worth it even if it means pissing off people who expect stuff for free.
Heck I bet this change will drive up awareness of Flickr. I can't even remember what I have there, but now I'm going to look up my creds and log in to find out.
> In 2013, Yahoo lost sight of what makes Flickr truly special and responded to a changing landscape in online photo sharing by giving every Flickr user a staggering terabyte of free storage
Well, that's one way to make the only remaining feature of your product sound like a bad thing...
Flickr's main feature is being a service that prioritizes photography as a portfolio, rather than photos as a visual social blogfeed. Limiting free users to 1,000 photos effectively kills the ability to use it as a clunkier Instagram. As long as there's enough revenue from ads and the pro accounts, this may be the best way forward for Flickr as a long-term service.
I've been a pro user for awhile. I guess the downside of this is that I now feel locked in, having well over 1,000 photos. I think previously, had I downgraded to the free version, I'd be able to keep all my photos but no longer provide them as full-size downloads. I don't have a particular complaint with Flickr as a service, it's just I don't do a lot of photography other than casual uploading to Instagram these days. That said, that Smugmug is committed to taking a different, coherent direction provides me with a lot more confidence than the years of Yahoo doing virtually nothing.
edit: maybe I'm grandfathered in for unlimited photos, if I were to downgrade to Free? The wording in the announcement is unclear.
No, I probably have a 100 if even that. But the other ~9,900 are a nice archive of living in New York, and I get occasional requests from people (who can't find the buried download button) to use or copy a photo from some random street.
Importantly, they don't have to be portfolio level quality. Flickr is a fantastic place for photographers of all ability levels, and is especially great for those looking to learn & grow in their craft. All that's really required is a love of photography. If you care, we care.
It might have been intended that way originally (although I joined in 2005 and I don't remember this ever being a thing) but once they forced Yahoo!Photos into there, it pretty much just became a huge porn stash. Presumably once the 1000 photo limit kicks in, it'll be a much less huge porn stash.
I think you nailed the marketing of this change. Though, if Flickr posted the steps/goals to making the user a "priority" rather than a "product," I would be more convinced. A cursory read of their TOS doesn't indicate any changes (though this may be premature as the changes are not in effect), and their (1)non-blog upgrade post doesn't seem to indicate any changes in data collection/selling.
As an aside, if you were looking to subscribe to their Pro product, the link in the blog post contains a coupon for $15 off their yearly subscription.
Servers cost money. People making the software and running the servers cost money. Previously those costs were hidden from end-users, usually by advertising-based business models. Now that consumers aren't putting up with that as much, smart companies are doing the old-fashioned thing of charging people for the valuable services they provide, instead of selling off human attention to advertisers. On the whole, this kind of stuff is better for everyone.
I'm a fan of Flickr, and for me the community is the reason I upload my photos there. If this makes Flickr sustainable and lets the team invest in improving the product and fostering the community, I think it's a great move. Plus, seeing highly curated feeds is what people want, not just a dumping ground for every frame in your roll/SD card.
Yeah, same here. I was fairly active on it > 10 years ago but haven't really kept up with it since I got locked out of my original account once they switched to Yahoo. I can only imagine the amount of trash that would get uploaded with everyone getting essentially and unlimited amount of space. I always enjoyed the quality I could find there and it seems like they are trying to get back to that.
It's actually a good idea. It forces the user to do some curating of their images, encouraging them to only put their best images online. Which in turn should result in more browsers engaging with the site and photographer.
And that's why you don't use (free) cloud services as your only backup. I thought about storing all my family photos on flicker a few years ago... Would have been useless now.
I did that and I am happy about this announcement b/c I had lost faith in Yahoo a while ago and Verizon deal sealed it for me. I have over 80K pics there and no easy way for me to delete them, now they will do it for me.
Flickr is under new ownership (mine). We would love the opportunity to keep your 80K photos safe and let you share them with those you care about most. Please let me know if there's something we can do to help with this.
SmugMug is really bringing back sanity into Flickr, good to see this after the Yahoo fiasco.
I created Talegraph [1] as a platform to tell stories with your pictures, and it has been hard for us to explain to users why paying for the product is the only way to ensure your pictures will stay online and private.
Paying for what you use & privacy is not something normal people are used to, but this is the only sustainable way imo.
This looks like just the product I need to move away from putting my travel snaps on Facebook. Instagram isn't suited for albums and Flickr is hard to build a narrative with. Looking forward to trying it out after my next trip!
I would love to do it, but unfortunately most APIs forbid imports and only allow you to store pictures for caching purposes (Flickr [1], Google Photos [2]) and have restrictions / heavy fees for commercial usage.
Dropbox import is planned, I havent looked at SmugMug API's terms yet but will add it to the todolist.
Is that if the service does it, or if the users do it?
When I moved my photos from Flickr to SmugMug a few years back they (SmugMug) had a browser plugin that moved everything over. I thought it was odd, but figured it was to get around some kind of rule like that.
Yes this could work, and even if the API terms do not allow it (ie Google Photos API do not allow you to download the pictures for storage) you can use the Data Export feature that most websites have and use this export to upload back your data elsewhere.
Have you looked into automatically generating "travel tracks" for each chapter in a Tale from OwnTracks data?[1] An integration like that would definitely make Premium more appealing, and be more interesting than a map with a "pin" on it.
Do you have any plans to add an export ("take out") option that will allow you to download the images, text, captions, etc. as JSON? I worry about investing the time to create some beautiful "tales" but not having a good way to archive them in case you are acquired / shutdown / decide to call it quits.
Thanks!
I plan to add tracks to the maps feature. I only added maps recently and this is the next logical step. I did not know about OwnTracks but I definitely plan to allow importing external GPS data, in addition to EXIF GPS data.
For the data export, this is definitely planned. I can do it manually right know if you ask for it, but creating a process to do it automatically is not the top priority. But we will not shutdown or be acquired before this is in place. I got screwed too many time by other SaaS who just disappeared so I dont want to repeat this with my users.
Good luck with this! Way back 10 years ago I started a private ning group for close old friends who were still very conservative online. Un & pw protected closed community. They are mostly on FB now and just don't understand about your digital rights online.
I think and hope people may start waking up a bit with the FB and Yahoo fiascos...
I commend the Flickr team for making this move. It takes courage to make this kind of change, when you know you'll take some flak for it (e.g. this very HN thread). At the end of the day, you'll piss off some people, but you know that the decision makes sense and you forge ahead.
Thank you! (Disclaimer: Blog author, CEO & Chief Geek here). I clearly believe, deeply, that focusing on photographers who care about photography is the right path forward, and I'm excited to see others feel that way, too. Please feel free to ask any questions I might be able to answer, and thanks again.
Do you feel that three months is adequate warning to actively delete people's data? If they've entrusted their photos solely to you, they may not have any way to recover data that is incredibly unique... you can't just recreate a photo.
I definitely think it's enough time to cut off new upload for people over the limit, but you should strongly consider whether or not your storage costs are that high as to make it worth it to not give a longer runway for people to export.
Is there any discussion about making it easy to sell prints? I'm an amateur photographer and have had several people inquire about prints, but I never know what to say because I have no idea how to make prints, nor do I have a lot of time. I know Yahoo had a WallArt program, but it seems to have failed, which is strange since it seems like most pro photographers sell prints.
Great feedback, thanks. This is a great secondary line of business for SmugMug already, so this is great to hear and we'll think about it. Thanks again.
I just want to express my gratitude for finally, fully embracing wider gamuts. I've been eagerly awaiting this day (and have a group all set up to show them off - https://www.flickr.com/groups/2234658@N22/).
Questions:
1. To the extent reprocessing is necessary, will that be done automatically (e.g. as it is for photos originally uploaded at full resolution, and now being displayed at 5K)?
2. Do all mobile OSs provide the color profile management necessary for the app to properly display photos? I know this was a challenge in the past.
3. Will there be any indication a photo is outside of sRGB, aside from EXIF?
1. Should be automatic. Still testing, but looking fantastic so far.
2. The coverage across modern OSes, browsers, and devices is incredibly high, and increasing daily, or we wouldn't be finally pulling the trigger. (I've wanted to do this for 16 years!)
3. Hmm, hadn't thought about this. What did you have in mind?
That's all great to here. I was thinking that the color space could be listed within the little section below the photo summarizing the EXIF data (with little pictorials for aperture, lens, shutter speed, flash, etc.). That would make it a lot easier to know if you're seeing a photo as intended.
Surprisingly enough, they have a data export on the account page. I'm not sure when this was added but it was always a pain point for me and a reason I stopped paying any attention to my Flickr account. All it took was a drastic change to make me re-check my account!
> Free members with more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded to Flickr have until Tuesday, January 8, 2019, to upgrade to Pro or download content over the limit. After January 8, 2019, members over the limit will no longer be able to upload new photos to Flickr. After February 5, 2019, free accounts that contain over 1,000 photos or videos will have content actively deleted -- starting from oldest to newest date uploaded -- to meet the new limit.
I have a Pro account so maybe it's different, but I have a "Request my Flickr data" button in the bottom right of my account page: https://www.flickr.com/account
And unless something has changed recently, IIRC, Flickr had a very generous and fairly easy to use JSON API. In the past I've been able to bulk download my ~10,000 photos with just a few calls: https://idratherbewriting.com/learnapidoc/docapis_flickr_exa...
In the time it took to write this comment you could've logged in and spotted the big "Export my data" button right there on the Account Settings page...
I really like this. I want to have an honest relationship with a service provider. I pay them for their service and they don't steal my data or reuse it in any way.
I have been using Flickr to archive my photos since 2013 when they announced a 1TB limit for free users, and have been paying them $50/year since 2016 when they limited availability to Pro users for their first-party auto-upload tool ( http://flickr.com/uploadr ).
It did seem like the 1TB limit was too good to last when it was announced 5 years ago.
Still, it's a relatively inexpensive extra archive for my photos (400GB) that supplements other backups. The archive is sorta searchable and kinda good for sharing with family and friends.
@onethumb Flickr Pro user here since 2007. There used to be an "Archive" view that had a calendar you could click through and see pictures taken or uploaded on a specific date. I haven't been able to find it since the Camera Roll feature launched.
Camera Roll is certainly useful, but I'd love if I could just quickly click on a calendar and see photos from a certain date rather than waiting for Camera Roll to load up and scrolling/filtering through the huge list. I realize Camera Roll has this feature as well, but I miss the old "Archive" version.
Thanks for being a customer, and thanks for the feedback. I'll look into whether we can revive this or not. Were you using it to find your own photos, or photos from the community, or... ?
I've been a Pro user for a long time before Yahoo started to screw things up badly. Flickr is only alive today because of the communities that use it. A lot of bloggers used and still use it to share pictures that are freely licensed (CC-BY-*), you should at least consider to keep those in some form or another or provide the means to redirect the links from the search result.
Ooh, I found it! If you visit someone's else's About page (like mine: https://www.flickr.com/people/donmacaskill/ ) and click on my join date, you'll see the calendar interface. Presumably, you want to be able to do this on your own photos? I'm not sure why you can't, but I'm finding out. :)
Let me see my photos (and only my photos) on the map view. This used to be a link on my profile, I used it often to track photos to locations. Now the map view seems to just be a global view of everyone bunched together.
Too much of searching currently is based on keyword. But photos should be able to be easily searched other ways, like date, location, color, etc. If I could search all of those and limit it to myself or a friends photostream it would really help me find what I'm looking for.
Great feedback, thanks. I personally use this exact search (my photos on a map) on SmugMug, so clearly something we should re-introduce to Flickr (or maybe just make easier to find?). I'll investigate.
I use it all the time to search my own photos. It tries to figure out the content of the images so I can search for "horses" and it will find every image I have of horses (well of course it's not perfect).
We have this at Flickr already and it's pretty fantastic, imho. Is there a specific taxonomy or tag we're not detecting properly? Thanks for the feedback!
I really like Flickr. There's a wealth of beautiful images, great groups (even though a lot of the ones I used are dead/dying), and I really like that I can upload uncompressed images. A lot of what this post says rings true, and hopefully they can right the ship on the engagement front, because right now it feels pretty dismal. When I post to Instagram, I get 20 times the engagement. I'm not sure how they fix that, but I'll stay on board as long as they keep trying to improve things. I'd have no problem going pro if I hit the 1000 image limit (right now I'm at 574).
"First, and most crucially, the free terabyte largely attracted members who were drawn by the free storage, not by engagement with other lovers of photography. This caused a significant tonal shift in our platform, away from the community interaction and exploration of shared interests that makes Flickr the best shared home for photographers in the world."
I don't have a problem with their decision, and I'll certainly upgrade to pro in the next few weeks. But I also don't use Flickr for "community interaction and exploration of shared interests" - I just want to be able to create albums and put photos in them. So the storage was useful and the ostensible reason for the change (reversing the "tonal shift") doesn't entirely convince me.
But this isn't unexpected, and I think the purchase by SmugMug was a good thing. I just hope they can stop randomly losing my photos after this...
> So the storage was useful and the ostensible reason for the change (reversing the "tonal shift") doesn't convince me.
What are you not convinced about? They were pretty clear that people who use Flickr as a storage space rather than a photography community are not their target audience, and therefor will not be the focus of their efforts and goodwill.
> What are you not convinced about? They were pretty clear that people who use Flickr as a storage space rather than a photography community are not their target audience, and therefor will not be the focus of their efforts and goodwill.
I suspect that the change is more to do with the cost of storage than with re-creating some photographic community that may have existed before 2013. But I'm also happy to be proved wrong.
Yes, I am just using Flickr for storage. And while most of my albums are public, my photographic skills are fairly average compared to many on Flickr, so they are unlikely to be able to monetise my efforts. But I'm not interested in being part of a "photographic community" because, while I enjoy photography, I don't do it to be in a community. And I suspect that they see community participation as basically user-generated content creation, and I'm not into that either.
I'm happy to accept that I'm not a user they can support for free. I like Flickr, wish it well, and am happy to pay for pro.
And we're happy to have you as Pro. Thanks! We have lots of customers who like to use Flickr for storage, and we're happy to have them. If you care about photography, for whatever reason, we care about you.
> I suspect that the change is more to do with the cost of storage
I think you're right about that, but they did address it up front:
> Second, you can tell a lot about a product by how it makes money. Giving away vast amounts of storage creates data that can be sold to advertisers, with the inevitable result being that advertisers’ interests are prioritized over yours.
*
> I'm happy to accept that I'm not a user they can support for free. I like Flickr, wish it well, and am happy to pay for pro
That's great! And I want to say that I highly respect the maturity and understanding you demonstrate here. I wish more people adopted this attitude.
>I just want to be able to create albums and put photos in them. So the storage was useful and the ostensible reason for the change (reversing the "tonal shift") doesn't convince me.
So, in other words... You're not the user they're trying to attract. That's exactly what they're saying.
Not quite. I am using their storage and I don't want to particiapte in a "community". The pictures in my albums don't bear much comparison with work that more able photgraphers than me can produce, but I'm selective about the pictures that I publish and spend time working on them in Lightroom. I'm not stuffing Flickr with cat photos like some social feed.
tldr is that I may not be the kind of user that they want or can support for free, but I think my use of the site is valid and I'm happy to pay to continue using it that way.
Pre-2013 Flickr was a really fun place and I want to go back to there. So I love the initiative and direction here.
However, I lost the thread of the argument at the penultimate paragraph. If the “vast majority” of current free users will still qualify, why will this change the community in a significant way?
The users in the free tier are now given a hard ceiling of 1,000 photos, so it would seemingly dampen their future ambitions to use Flickr as a social stream or bulk archive.
I get that, but apparently they weren’t hitting that limit anyway. So is this a purely psychological tactic? That’s fascinating...kind of leveraging the psychology of an “unlimited” cellular plan but in reverse.
It might be psychological on Flickr's end too, as developers no longer have to propose new features that have the requirement of scaling with a high-resource-consuming free tier.
But that's my point — how is the resource consumption changing if hardly anybody is kicked out? Is there a tiny number of people storing a terabyte of photos each? But if the number of people is tiny, how can that be affecting the community feeling?
They're giving 3 month's notice of the automatic deletion of any photos over the 1000 allowed free ones. Not much time and sure to catch out people who don't log in/check their email frequently (including their spam folders) or who have technical problems (crap upload speeds, no capacity to download and store gigs of what might be the only existent copies of photos). I wonder if they'd be better of holding onto the soon to be deleted content for a lot longer, as they're hardly likely to go bust continuing to host it a little longer. I guess moving them to a non-free account would feel a like like extortion but surely this is worse - photos which were uploaded many years ago lost forever.
Much as I try and avoid using Google, I stick with them for the free email and unlimited photo storage.
> Much as I try and avoid using Google, I stick with them for the free email and unlimited photo storage.
I'm actually quite fearful of the day when Google will end its generous offer... We often see cloud providers struggling to cope with “unlimited” free plans, perhaps we should take all of them with a grain of salt and rely on local backups precisely to avoid the quasi-extortion that comes when the “unlimited cloud” mantra goes downhill.
Indeed, Gmail does have a limit, but Google Photos still lets you upload “unlimited” photos on that lower quality plan — which is more than enough for a vast majority of users.
I've began noticing the issues of large-scale cloud storage with the OneDrive fiasco, so I learned my lessons the hard way over there. But unfortunately too many people remain invested in such ecosystems and have no idea of the risks involved...
I use Google for my 'main' feed of photos just because Photos is an excellent product and I don't mind if they are downsampled for sharing or posting online.
I also keep all of all of my processed RAW files on Amazon Prime Photos. I never log into the app though, it's simply just my offsite backup. My NAS automatically syncs to Amazon Photos weekly.
I would feel better if they just grandfathered in any existing photos and made the change to all new uploads going forward. I'm generally OK with the reasons behind the move, but having people lose data because they were using the product in a way they were explicitly told was OK to use it at that time leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Google's "free" unlimited photo storage comes with some costs. First, they compress and resize your photos. They're pretty public about this, and they do offer paid plans which don't do this. If you're fine with that, great, it's a good deal. Second, it's widely understood that they're likely mining data in your photos to profile and advertise to you. I can't know this for sure, since I can't see their source code, but other research shows fairly strong correlation evidence. (No idea if paying for storage removes this or not).
No need, its spelled out pretty clearly in Google's TOS [0]:
> Some of our Services allow you to upload, submit, store, send or receive content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
> When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.
> Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.
It might be a nice Flickr feature -- even if you had no plans of leaving Flickr -- to auto-transfer all of your photos to some other storage service. Even something like Amazon Glacier, which would obviously not be a competitor to Flickr. The user would, of course, be responsible for having, maintaining, paying for, etc., this other storage service.
have you actually tried it? because i did, when i was trying to close out my flickr account, and it failed miserably. every third or fourth photo downloaded was corrupted. all the free options i tried weren't much better. i wound up paying for a third-party app i used exactly once, to get all my photos out.
Yeah, two months' notice does not meet my definition of "ample time to upgrade to Pro [...] or download your photos and videos.*" And it's scummy to hide the timeline in a tiny footnote. I'm sure plenty of these people are using it as a backup solution and never even visiting the site. Totally fine with the decision not to support those users anymore, but it's not reasonable to nuke their data in 3 months because some email notice got lost in their inbox.
It took 3 days to get my data download request response, I have about ninety 300 megabyte zip files of photos, and at my maximum download rate it would take a couple of weeks to download, plus there's an unspecified time limit where the zip files are deleted from their servers and one has to request the data again.
We live in a world where most people get twitchy if they haven't looked at their phone for an hour - how is 3 months notice considered so hugely unacceptable in this particular circumstance?
> ... who don't log in/check their email frequently (including their spam folders) or who have technical problems (crap upload speeds, no capacity to download and store gigs of what might be the only existent copies of photos).
This really does sound like a tiny minority of Internet users - sufficient bandwidth and tech savvy to upload > 1000 photos back in the good old days - but insufficient attention, bandwidth, or local storage a decade later to host their own photos.
Just how many people are out there that uploaded to flickr / yahoo and then deleted their local copies of their photos? And how much pandering are they expecting?
"Here's a system I uploaded my most important memories to, but I only look at them every 6 months, and I didn't pay for their storage, but I'm confident that where I dumped them a decade ago will be where they'll stay forever."
I agree it's not enough time, and is screwing over the least technical users. Even if they don't want to actively host photos, they could archive it so when users log in they can say "Hey all the photos are in long term archival...download them now, or pay for an account".
Amazon offers unlimited full resolution photo storage for Prime users...I think I'll move my items there.
Does anyone have data on how Google Photos generates revenue? Is it just a mechanism to upsell Google Drive storage quotas? Or are they also mining the photo meta data?
"The information gleaned from analyzing these photos does not travel outside of this product — not today. But if I thought we could return immense value to the users based on this data I'm sure we would consider doing that. For instance, if it were possible for Google Photos to figure out that I have a Tesla, and Tesla wanted to alert me to a recall, that would be a service that we would consider offering, with appropriate controls and disclosure to the user."
-- Bradley Horowitz, Google VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing (2015)
So yes, using info from the photos is definitively on the table. But I doubt they made Photos with a specific income stream in mind; they want to know everything about everything and everyone. The possibilities (for monetization and much more) are tremendously higher when you can leverage the connections between datasets, even if they are kinda lame by themselves.
"if it were possible for Google Photos to figure out that I have a Tesla, and Tesla wanted to alert me to a recall, that would be a service that we would consider offering"
That sounds terrible. He attempts to soften it by using an example that seems very important/critical (a vehicle "recall") instead of saying something like "If Google Photos can tell you like Starbucks and Startbucks wanted to show ads to you, that would be a service that we would consider offering"
@Onethumb: I have ~150k photos on Flickr and a 10 year paid account but I stopped using it ~1.5 years ago when I got sick of their video upload timestamp issues. I have not checked recently if fixed.
When I upload photos, Flickr looks at the taken date of the photo and sorts them that way. When I upload videos from the computer (using the upload tool), Flickr does NOT look at the metadata to set the taken date. Instead, then taken date is set to the current date meaning the videos are out of order of the photos.
Thank you so much for being a customer! I would love to help track this down and fix it, especially since I'm writing the new photo & video services. :) I will add this to my list.
If I remember correctly, Flickr used to hide free user's over 200 photos and they'll show up one upgraded to pro. But now they'll delete exceeded photos.
SmugMug allows a custom domain. I'd argue that it's more private / less community oriented than SmugMug. Depends on what you want I guess; I've read about many people using 500px to upload some of their best shots as a portfolio & using smugmug for the rest.
"Depends on what you want I guess; I've read about many people using 500px to upload some of their best shots as a portfolio & using smugmug for the rest."
That's what I do. Until now Flickr was my storage for all pictures and 500px only for my best.
Smugmug allows custom domains, including support for https. It also allows for custom branding and layout design (your name here, powered by Smugmug).
I wasn't able to get a bare domain (e.g. domainname.tld) to work directly, so i set up a redirect to www.domainname.tld from there and it's been good for me. I don't know if that has changed since I set it up.
I guess it depends on your use case. I'm interested in having my own gallery I can share, rather than a Flickr page. I prefer "my photo gallery site" to "my pictures on Flickr", so for me the custom domain and branding is important. I don't particularly care about the community aspects beyond viewing the photos of some of my friends, so that piece of Flickr holds little interest to me. Of course when I set it up I was also very disillusioned about Yahoo and wanted to get away from that and into something that felt more sustainable.
I can't speak for SmugMug specifically, but generally the reason you can't use bare domains to point to hosted services is that the hosted services want you to use a CNAME record so they can cycle in/out IP addresses at will. CNAME records aren't allowed on bare domains.
Yeah, one of things I've been curious to see is how the two services are going to slot together.
Long term Flickr Pro user (signed up 2007) and when my Pro sub expires a year from now there's some compelling reasons to dump Flickr and migrate to SmugMug - not least that SM's had literally anything done with it in the last few years, while Flickr's just got clunkier and clunkier (but also that there's a bunch of old, not-good, photos that I don't really care about on there).
The quality of the "community" on both Flickr and 500px makes the de-prioritisation of the same on SmugMug an advantage too - there's way too much spam on Flickr, although even that's dropped off over the last few years.
I'm not going to complain about a company refocusing their profitability and adjusting things - good for them.
but i think this was horrible messaging. I would have much rather appreciated a more straightforward approach, instead of trying to get me to be excited for being limited to 1,000 images and video. I think it shows flickr still has a ways to go in building trust - because being disingenuous in messaging doesn't build it.
Stopped paying for pro a few years ago because of arrogance and hubris that was common in the web darlings of the last ten years. Couldn't get a simple customer service request answered without snark or condescension. Garbage redesigns of the layout and refusal to listen to feedback meant you were paying for storage and nothing more (pretensions about "community" notwithstanding).
On the other hand, my limited interactions with Smugmug have been stellar. I really like those guys and wish them luck.
The joy of Flickr was exploring the random pictures from ordinary people. I could care less about the heavily Photoshopped "prosumer" stuff that seems to be more popular on the platform. I liked seeing natural skill at composition instead of digital post-processing.
Unfortunately, it looks like SmugMug wants Flickr to be more like SmugMug, so I don't see myself buying back into pro.
Flickr to me was mostly about sharing my photos with friends and family before facebook killed that use case. I don't use facebook much any more, but no one else in my circle uses Flickr either.
Deleting photos over the limit is a bit annoying though. I seem to remember in the past they just made them temporarily inaccessible if you let Pro lapse for a bit (while travelling or whatever).
Time to whip up something that will compare what I have uploaded on flickr (4000+ photos over 12 years) to what's on my local backups so I can download what I have to and forget about the rest.
For what it's worth, we definitely don't want Flickr to be more like SmugMug. Flickr is amazing and different and that's great. We want Flickr to be Flickr and that's what we're investing in. We'd be thrilled to have you back as Pro, and I promise we'll work hard to keep you.
One thing that's scary to me as someone who will be affected is the thought that one day, so much of my work could be just gone.
I am not a full-time photographer; there are runs of time every year where I spend a lot of of time shooting (e.g. live music gigs), and then long periods of inactivity.
I have over 1000 photos on Flickr. I've been a user for over a decade. And I found out about this change from this post, because I haven't been reading the associated Yahoo email that often.
So, leaving my account alone for 3 months = losing most of my photos forever.
Great.
Just the service I want to pay for.
I understand the business need, but perhaps could you take it easy on irreversible changes? Sure, make the photos over the 1K limit unavailable even to the account holders -- but let them buy the access back long after the change.
Not only you might get more subscriptions from that alone, but there's also this:
Unlimited storage might not be feasible for a fixed pricd. Photos are growing larger, dollar is getting cheaper - we're betting on HDD costs going down, but that's not a given.
You might need to have a change in the future.
Again.
And I don't want to lose data because I'd have missed that announcement - just like I missed this one.
How you treat your free users indicates what the paying attention ones can expect.
Please, for the sake of everything that's holy, give your devoted users some goddamn peace of mind that they can camp in the mountains for a year and don't return to see their data gone.
Yahoo! screwed up there - but two wrongs do not make a right.
Not all of us use the service every day. Take it easy on annihilating work and memories.
TL;DR: every account whose data you keep is a potential subscription. Every user whose data you deleted is a guaranteed loss of business and eternal scorn. Please take care of your intermittent, but devoted users.
A 'devoted user' that doesn't pay for the service, doesn't read the emails they send, and logs on at less than 3 month intervals?
I keep my full photo archive synced between a server, two workstations, and two laptops -- spread across at least two physical locations. I can't begin to imagine the thinking of someone who keeps all their photos on a single vendor's system, especially without some sturdy SLA in place (and even then...).
> I can't begin to imagine the thinking of someone who keeps all their photos on a single vendor's system
Quite a few assumptions you are making here.
I have all my photos since 2003 backed up. But I didn't keep track of all the sets I shared with people over a decade (I'm wiser now), and selecting the photos to present to other people takes a long time for me.
>A 'devoted user' that doesn't pay for the service
By that logic, there are no devoted FOSS users, no devoted redditors, etc. And as SmugMug said: I was paying for the service with my data. Now they want me to pay with money, and I am OK with that too.
>doesn't read the emails they send
...they didn't even send any. I assumed the fault was on my part; it was not.
>and logs on at less than 3 month intervals?
My usage pattern is intermittent periods of heavy usage, and that has been consistent over the past 10+ years. That is why I call myself a devoted user; I've stayed with them through Yahoo! and SmugMug acquisitions, and haven't shared photos with anything other than Flickr in the past 5 years.
This is the point I am trying to communicate: devoted users aren't just the ones who use the service all the time.
I think complaining about changes being made to a free service is a losing battle, but I'll go along with you a bit longer.
It sounded sarcastic when you said:
So, leaving my account alone for 3 months = losing most of my photos forever.
Great.
Just the service I want to pay for.
But if you were actually paying them, this wouldn't be a problem.
And no, I don't quite understand your recent claim that you were paying them with your data - that's not paying, and clearly your expectations were not aligned with the actual contract (or absence of same) that you had/have with the company.
You've since stated you have all your photos since 2003 backed up, but you claimed originally that this change of policy for non-paying users would see you 'losing most of my photos forever'. So, which is it?
If it's just 'sets of photos that you've selected to share with people' then that doesn't really mesh with your earlier complaints.
Your other complaint - that you haven't received an email they haven't sent yet - is disingenuous. The announcement was made on their web site, and (I'm sure) emails will follow. Mail-outs are typically staggered over many hours, perhaps days - but you typically want the web announcement available first. In the unlikely event you don't get an email in the next couple of days (though it sounds like you don't read that email account either, and haven't in your ten years of using this service thought to change your account's contact email address) then I'll concede this point.
>and haven't in your ten years of using this service thought to change your account's contact email address
OK, I really need to ask: are you a Flickr user?
When Yahoo! bought Flickr and forced everyone to use a Yahoo! login, it became extremely inconvenient not to tie your Flickr account to your Yahoo account if you have one, and I do. Logging in to Yahoo! mail would automatically log you in to Flickr (still does!).
Furthermore, if you have several accounts, you can't get notifications from all of them on an email that's used for logging into one of them.
You just can't. You get an "email associated with another account" error.
It so happens that I use my primary email as a login for a Flickr! account that I use for live music photography only (and, by the way, no notifications there either!) -- but that account has <1000 photos, so it won't be affected.
The whole use-email-as-login policy that Yahoo! instilled on users is a clusterfuck, but that's what it's been, and simply setting a contact email on the account requires jumping through some hoops. (..I am very glad that Flickr will finally move away from that).
So I have to ask: are you a Flickr user, or are you just arguing hypothetically on behalf of SmugMug?
Anyway. My main point was that I see nothing wrong with holding data for ransom, but deleting it without recovery options on a short notice is a very, very bad move.
And three months for me is a very short notice in the context of my 10+ years of using the service.
I have a yahoo account or two, and I think I have a flickr account somewhere ... but as a general rule I don't / wouldn't keep a sole copy of data that I care about on a free-hosting system that I know can't contact me.
So, you are not an active user of the platform we are discussing here, you are not affected by the update, and you don't know what it is that I'm talking about except for in general terms.
In light of that, stating your opinion on whether I can call myself a devoted user, and comment on what I should or should not expect from the service that you are not using seems.. mysterious?
And I didn't even get into a fraction of features and data that Flickr stores with photos (comments, photos being part of a set, etc -- Flickr is a social network, after all) that are hard or nearly impossible to back up. We are not discussing the merits of backups here, but let's not pretend that users who back up their files meticulously will not be adversely affected if they don't pay up within 3 months.
You make it sound like I've never seen people on the internet whinge about how something they weren't paying for is changing their T&C's and the person who isn't paying for the service is very upset by this because ... reasons.
I think I can question your devotion to a service by how much you're willing to pay to use it (and how much you complain about it).
You appear to be complaining about having to stump up ~ USD$2 / month to continue to enjoy the same carefree usage you've managed to obtain for free for the last decade.
Aha - I see you redacted your complaint about a personal email not arriving after onethumb responded in another thread saying much the same that I did (email takes time to send / propagate).
When flicker announced 1tb free I never thought 'oh great that sounds like a save env for my images' I thought 'lets dump my images' there as a free backup let's look how long they will offer it.
It takes time (as in, many days) to notify >100M people. We're working on it. The blog post and assorted spontaneous coverage, like Hacker News, is faster.
Even then, targeting the most affected ones (those on free plans with more than, say, 900 photos) first is, I assume, a much simpler job that might save you from a bit of a public scrutiny and give those people an extra jiffy or two to act.
224 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadAnd as the saying goes in creative industries: you can't eat "exposure." The only way to make money is the charge money, and it's generally worth it even if it means pissing off people who expect stuff for free.
Heck I bet this change will drive up awareness of Flickr. I can't even remember what I have there, but now I'm going to look up my creds and log in to find out.
Well, that's one way to make the only remaining feature of your product sound like a bad thing...
I've been a pro user for awhile. I guess the downside of this is that I now feel locked in, having well over 1,000 photos. I think previously, had I downgraded to the free version, I'd be able to keep all my photos but no longer provide them as full-size downloads. I don't have a particular complaint with Flickr as a service, it's just I don't do a lot of photography other than casual uploading to Instagram these days. That said, that Smugmug is committed to taking a different, coherent direction provides me with a lot more confidence than the years of Yahoo doing virtually nothing.
edit: maybe I'm grandfathered in for unlimited photos, if I were to downgrade to Free? The wording in the announcement is unclear.
1000 photos can go a long way if used in the way Flickr was originally intended, which as you noted was a portfolio of sorts.
That's not how I'm reading it. It seems like it'll affect all Flickr users across the board.
I mean, that's what they want it to be now, but I don't feel like that's what it was under Yahoo...
Maybe: Storage is expensive, and we'd rather collect money from you, rather than sell you to advertisers.
As an aside, if you were looking to subscribe to their Pro product, the link in the blog post contains a coupon for $15 off their yearly subscription.
1. https://www.flickr.com/lookingahead
Servers cost money. People making the software and running the servers cost money. Previously those costs were hidden from end-users, usually by advertising-based business models. Now that consumers aren't putting up with that as much, smart companies are doing the old-fashioned thing of charging people for the valuable services they provide, instead of selling off human attention to advertisers. On the whole, this kind of stuff is better for everyone.
Now I would be "forced" to pay, which in itself wouldn't be all too bad I guess.
> I thought about storing all my family photos on flicker a few years ago... Would have been useless now.
No, it would have been exactly as you just said. You'd start paying and your backup would still be there.
https://www.flickr.com/lookingahead/?utm_campaign=flickr-loo...
I created Talegraph [1] as a platform to tell stories with your pictures, and it has been hard for us to explain to users why paying for the product is the only way to ensure your pictures will stay online and private. Paying for what you use & privacy is not something normal people are used to, but this is the only sustainable way imo.
[1] https://www.talegraph.com
Dropbox import is planned, I havent looked at SmugMug API's terms yet but will add it to the todolist.
[1] https://www.flickr.com/help/terms/api [2] https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/acceptab...
When I moved my photos from Flickr to SmugMug a few years back they (SmugMug) had a browser plugin that moved everything over. I thought it was odd, but figured it was to get around some kind of rule like that.
Have you looked into automatically generating "travel tracks" for each chapter in a Tale from OwnTracks data?[1] An integration like that would definitely make Premium more appealing, and be more interesting than a map with a "pin" on it.
Do you have any plans to add an export ("take out") option that will allow you to download the images, text, captions, etc. as JSON? I worry about investing the time to create some beautiful "tales" but not having a good way to archive them in case you are acquired / shutdown / decide to call it quits.
[1] https://owntracks.org/booklet/guide/clients/
I think and hope people may start waking up a bit with the FB and Yahoo fiascos...
I definitely think it's enough time to cut off new upload for people over the limit, but you should strongly consider whether or not your storage costs are that high as to make it worth it to not give a longer runway for people to export.
Questions:
1. To the extent reprocessing is necessary, will that be done automatically (e.g. as it is for photos originally uploaded at full resolution, and now being displayed at 5K)?
2. Do all mobile OSs provide the color profile management necessary for the app to properly display photos? I know this was a challenge in the past.
3. Will there be any indication a photo is outside of sRGB, aside from EXIF?
P.S. - I'm sure you're aware, but there's a (closed) group of alpha/beta users (https://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrbeta/) always eager to help provide feedback.
2. The coverage across modern OSes, browsers, and devices is incredibly high, and increasing daily, or we wouldn't be finally pulling the trigger. (I've wanted to do this for 16 years!)
3. Hmm, hadn't thought about this. What did you have in mind?
I mostly agree with the direction they want to take, I just don't want to be part of the journey and so want to get my photos out.
> Free members with more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded to Flickr have until Tuesday, January 8, 2019, to upgrade to Pro or download content over the limit. After January 8, 2019, members over the limit will no longer be able to upload new photos to Flickr. After February 5, 2019, free accounts that contain over 1,000 photos or videos will have content actively deleted -- starting from oldest to newest date uploaded -- to meet the new limit.
I have a Pro account so maybe it's different, but I have a "Request my Flickr data" button in the bottom right of my account page: https://www.flickr.com/account
And unless something has changed recently, IIRC, Flickr had a very generous and fairly easy to use JSON API. In the past I've been able to bulk download my ~10,000 photos with just a few calls: https://idratherbewriting.com/learnapidoc/docapis_flickr_exa...
It did seem like the 1TB limit was too good to last when it was announced 5 years ago.
Still, it's a relatively inexpensive extra archive for my photos (400GB) that supplements other backups. The archive is sorta searchable and kinda good for sharing with family and friends.
I haven't really used their social or community features (the Explore experience, the magic donkey, and the pandas are all alien to me -- https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/361974994 , http://code.flickr.net/2009/03/03/panda-tuesday-the-history-... ).
Camera Roll is certainly useful, but I'd love if I could just quickly click on a calendar and see photos from a certain date rather than waiting for Camera Roll to load up and scrolling/filtering through the huge list. I realize Camera Roll has this feature as well, but I miss the old "Archive" version.
Too much of searching currently is based on keyword. But photos should be able to be easily searched other ways, like date, location, color, etc. If I could search all of those and limit it to myself or a friends photostream it would really help me find what I'm looking for.
I use it all the time to search my own photos. It tries to figure out the content of the images so I can search for "horses" and it will find every image I have of horses (well of course it's not perfect).
I don't have a problem with their decision, and I'll certainly upgrade to pro in the next few weeks. But I also don't use Flickr for "community interaction and exploration of shared interests" - I just want to be able to create albums and put photos in them. So the storage was useful and the ostensible reason for the change (reversing the "tonal shift") doesn't entirely convince me.
But this isn't unexpected, and I think the purchase by SmugMug was a good thing. I just hope they can stop randomly losing my photos after this...
(Edit: s/convince/entirely convince/)
What are you not convinced about? They were pretty clear that people who use Flickr as a storage space rather than a photography community are not their target audience, and therefor will not be the focus of their efforts and goodwill.
I suspect that the change is more to do with the cost of storage than with re-creating some photographic community that may have existed before 2013. But I'm also happy to be proved wrong.
Yes, I am just using Flickr for storage. And while most of my albums are public, my photographic skills are fairly average compared to many on Flickr, so they are unlikely to be able to monetise my efforts. But I'm not interested in being part of a "photographic community" because, while I enjoy photography, I don't do it to be in a community. And I suspect that they see community participation as basically user-generated content creation, and I'm not into that either.
I'm happy to accept that I'm not a user they can support for free. I like Flickr, wish it well, and am happy to pay for pro.
I think you're right about that, but they did address it up front:
> Second, you can tell a lot about a product by how it makes money. Giving away vast amounts of storage creates data that can be sold to advertisers, with the inevitable result being that advertisers’ interests are prioritized over yours.
*
> I'm happy to accept that I'm not a user they can support for free. I like Flickr, wish it well, and am happy to pay for pro
That's great! And I want to say that I highly respect the maturity and understanding you demonstrate here. I wish more people adopted this attitude.
Facebook, Apple Photos, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Photos and Unsplash all do this, with varying trade-offs of cost, quality, and privacy.
So, in other words... You're not the user they're trying to attract. That's exactly what they're saying.
tldr is that I may not be the kind of user that they want or can support for free, but I think my use of the site is valid and I'm happy to pay to continue using it that way.
Again, exactly the type of user they're trying to disuade from using their service...
However, I lost the thread of the argument at the penultimate paragraph. If the “vast majority” of current free users will still qualify, why will this change the community in a significant way?
Much as I try and avoid using Google, I stick with them for the free email and unlimited photo storage.
I'm actually quite fearful of the day when Google will end its generous offer... We often see cloud providers struggling to cope with “unlimited” free plans, perhaps we should take all of them with a grain of salt and rely on local backups precisely to avoid the quasi-extortion that comes when the “unlimited cloud” mantra goes downhill.
1)Gmail is free but does have a storage limit.
2) You can have an unlimited # of photos but not at full/original resolution. If you want full/orig you have to pay.
p.s. "...perhaps we should take all of them with a grain of salt..." Do you mean you haven't been doing this already? :)
I've began noticing the issues of large-scale cloud storage with the OneDrive fiasco, so I learned my lessons the hard way over there. But unfortunately too many people remain invested in such ecosystems and have no idea of the risks involved...
Besides the gigabyte price of a harddrive is about 0.02[0], so if google makes a dollar more in advertising it can afford to store quite a bit...
[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
I also keep all of all of my processed RAW files on Amazon Prime Photos. I never log into the app though, it's simply just my offsite backup. My NAS automatically syncs to Amazon Photos weekly.
I'd be very interested in looking at this research and evidence of correlation between ads and photo data. Can you please cite the reference?
> Some of our Services allow you to upload, submit, store, send or receive content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
> When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.
> Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.
[0] https://policies.google.com/terms
https://flickrdownloadr.com/
We live in a world where most people get twitchy if they haven't looked at their phone for an hour - how is 3 months notice considered so hugely unacceptable in this particular circumstance?
> ... who don't log in/check their email frequently (including their spam folders) or who have technical problems (crap upload speeds, no capacity to download and store gigs of what might be the only existent copies of photos).
This really does sound like a tiny minority of Internet users - sufficient bandwidth and tech savvy to upload > 1000 photos back in the good old days - but insufficient attention, bandwidth, or local storage a decade later to host their own photos.
Just how many people are out there that uploaded to flickr / yahoo and then deleted their local copies of their photos? And how much pandering are they expecting?
"Here's a system I uploaded my most important memories to, but I only look at them every 6 months, and I didn't pay for their storage, but I'm confident that where I dumped them a decade ago will be where they'll stay forever."
Amazon offers unlimited full resolution photo storage for Prime users...I think I'll move my items there.
Does anyone have data on how Google Photos generates revenue? Is it just a mechanism to upsell Google Drive storage quotas? Or are they also mining the photo meta data?
-- Bradley Horowitz, Google VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing (2015)
So yes, using info from the photos is definitively on the table. But I doubt they made Photos with a specific income stream in mind; they want to know everything about everything and everyone. The possibilities (for monetization and much more) are tremendously higher when you can leverage the connections between datasets, even if they are kinda lame by themselves.
That sounds terrible. He attempts to soften it by using an example that seems very important/critical (a vehicle "recall") instead of saying something like "If Google Photos can tell you like Starbucks and Startbucks wanted to show ads to you, that would be a service that we would consider offering"
When I upload photos, Flickr looks at the taken date of the photo and sorts them that way. When I upload videos from the computer (using the upload tool), Flickr does NOT look at the metadata to set the taken date. Instead, then taken date is set to the current date meaning the videos are out of order of the photos.
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2018/10/31/putting-your-best-photo...
Also: this is is not the only criteria, but do any of them allow a custom domain?
That's what I do. Until now Flickr was my storage for all pictures and 500px only for my best.
I wasn't able to get a bare domain (e.g. domainname.tld) to work directly, so i set up a redirect to www.domainname.tld from there and it's been good for me. I don't know if that has changed since I set it up.
Besides custom domain: what are the pros/cons of Flickr vs SmugMug?
Long term Flickr Pro user (signed up 2007) and when my Pro sub expires a year from now there's some compelling reasons to dump Flickr and migrate to SmugMug - not least that SM's had literally anything done with it in the last few years, while Flickr's just got clunkier and clunkier (but also that there's a bunch of old, not-good, photos that I don't really care about on there).
The quality of the "community" on both Flickr and 500px makes the de-prioritisation of the same on SmugMug an advantage too - there's way too much spam on Flickr, although even that's dropped off over the last few years.
but i think this was horrible messaging. I would have much rather appreciated a more straightforward approach, instead of trying to get me to be excited for being limited to 1,000 images and video. I think it shows flickr still has a ways to go in building trust - because being disingenuous in messaging doesn't build it.
On the other hand, my limited interactions with Smugmug have been stellar. I really like those guys and wish them luck.
The joy of Flickr was exploring the random pictures from ordinary people. I could care less about the heavily Photoshopped "prosumer" stuff that seems to be more popular on the platform. I liked seeing natural skill at composition instead of digital post-processing.
Unfortunately, it looks like SmugMug wants Flickr to be more like SmugMug, so I don't see myself buying back into pro.
Flickr to me was mostly about sharing my photos with friends and family before facebook killed that use case. I don't use facebook much any more, but no one else in my circle uses Flickr either.
Deleting photos over the limit is a bit annoying though. I seem to remember in the past they just made them temporarily inaccessible if you let Pro lapse for a bit (while travelling or whatever).
Time to whip up something that will compare what I have uploaded on flickr (4000+ photos over 12 years) to what's on my local backups so I can download what I have to and forget about the rest.
I am not a full-time photographer; there are runs of time every year where I spend a lot of of time shooting (e.g. live music gigs), and then long periods of inactivity.
I have over 1000 photos on Flickr. I've been a user for over a decade. And I found out about this change from this post, because I haven't been reading the associated Yahoo email that often.
So, leaving my account alone for 3 months = losing most of my photos forever.
Great.
Just the service I want to pay for.
I understand the business need, but perhaps could you take it easy on irreversible changes? Sure, make the photos over the 1K limit unavailable even to the account holders -- but let them buy the access back long after the change.
Not only you might get more subscriptions from that alone, but there's also this:
Unlimited storage might not be feasible for a fixed pricd. Photos are growing larger, dollar is getting cheaper - we're betting on HDD costs going down, but that's not a given.
You might need to have a change in the future.
Again.
And I don't want to lose data because I'd have missed that announcement - just like I missed this one.
How you treat your free users indicates what the paying attention ones can expect.
Please, for the sake of everything that's holy, give your devoted users some goddamn peace of mind that they can camp in the mountains for a year and don't return to see their data gone.
Yahoo! screwed up there - but two wrongs do not make a right.
Not all of us use the service every day. Take it easy on annihilating work and memories.
TL;DR: every account whose data you keep is a potential subscription. Every user whose data you deleted is a guaranteed loss of business and eternal scorn. Please take care of your intermittent, but devoted users.
I keep my full photo archive synced between a server, two workstations, and two laptops -- spread across at least two physical locations. I can't begin to imagine the thinking of someone who keeps all their photos on a single vendor's system, especially without some sturdy SLA in place (and even then...).
Quite a few assumptions you are making here.
I have all my photos since 2003 backed up. But I didn't keep track of all the sets I shared with people over a decade (I'm wiser now), and selecting the photos to present to other people takes a long time for me.
>A 'devoted user' that doesn't pay for the service
By that logic, there are no devoted FOSS users, no devoted redditors, etc. And as SmugMug said: I was paying for the service with my data. Now they want me to pay with money, and I am OK with that too.
>doesn't read the emails they send
...they didn't even send any. I assumed the fault was on my part; it was not.
>and logs on at less than 3 month intervals?
My usage pattern is intermittent periods of heavy usage, and that has been consistent over the past 10+ years. That is why I call myself a devoted user; I've stayed with them through Yahoo! and SmugMug acquisitions, and haven't shared photos with anything other than Flickr in the past 5 years.
This is the point I am trying to communicate: devoted users aren't just the ones who use the service all the time.
It sounded sarcastic when you said:
But if you were actually paying them, this wouldn't be a problem.And no, I don't quite understand your recent claim that you were paying them with your data - that's not paying, and clearly your expectations were not aligned with the actual contract (or absence of same) that you had/have with the company.
You've since stated you have all your photos since 2003 backed up, but you claimed originally that this change of policy for non-paying users would see you 'losing most of my photos forever'. So, which is it?
If it's just 'sets of photos that you've selected to share with people' then that doesn't really mesh with your earlier complaints.
Your other complaint - that you haven't received an email they haven't sent yet - is disingenuous. The announcement was made on their web site, and (I'm sure) emails will follow. Mail-outs are typically staggered over many hours, perhaps days - but you typically want the web announcement available first. In the unlikely event you don't get an email in the next couple of days (though it sounds like you don't read that email account either, and haven't in your ten years of using this service thought to change your account's contact email address) then I'll concede this point.
OK, I really need to ask: are you a Flickr user?
When Yahoo! bought Flickr and forced everyone to use a Yahoo! login, it became extremely inconvenient not to tie your Flickr account to your Yahoo account if you have one, and I do. Logging in to Yahoo! mail would automatically log you in to Flickr (still does!).
Furthermore, if you have several accounts, you can't get notifications from all of them on an email that's used for logging into one of them.
You just can't. You get an "email associated with another account" error.
It so happens that I use my primary email as a login for a Flickr! account that I use for live music photography only (and, by the way, no notifications there either!) -- but that account has <1000 photos, so it won't be affected.
The whole use-email-as-login policy that Yahoo! instilled on users is a clusterfuck, but that's what it's been, and simply setting a contact email on the account requires jumping through some hoops. (..I am very glad that Flickr will finally move away from that).
So I have to ask: are you a Flickr user, or are you just arguing hypothetically on behalf of SmugMug?
Anyway. My main point was that I see nothing wrong with holding data for ransom, but deleting it without recovery options on a short notice is a very, very bad move. And three months for me is a very short notice in the context of my 10+ years of using the service.
Thank you.
So, you are not an active user of the platform we are discussing here, you are not affected by the update, and you don't know what it is that I'm talking about except for in general terms.
In light of that, stating your opinion on whether I can call myself a devoted user, and comment on what I should or should not expect from the service that you are not using seems.. mysterious?
And I didn't even get into a fraction of features and data that Flickr stores with photos (comments, photos being part of a set, etc -- Flickr is a social network, after all) that are hard or nearly impossible to back up. We are not discussing the merits of backups here, but let's not pretend that users who back up their files meticulously will not be adversely affected if they don't pay up within 3 months.
I think I can question your devotion to a service by how much you're willing to pay to use it (and how much you complain about it).
You appear to be complaining about having to stump up ~ USD$2 / month to continue to enjoy the same carefree usage you've managed to obtain for free for the last decade.
So reading your email apparently wouldn't have helped you at all.
Great job, SmugMug.