Well-written product announcement! clear explanation of "bad news" for a lot of users, but encouraging for target customers. I hope when I grow up I too can write something like this. :)
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.
While I understand why they are adding a limit, the concept of just deleting the photos over the 1000 limit just unsettles me, and will almost certainly cause link rot, which is both sad and annoying when I encounter it.
I don't know what my dad will do, he's been using Flickr for quite a few years now, he used to pay for pro, but then stopped doing so after Yahoo bought Flickr and started breaking the UI. He has over 1000 photos, but I am not sure if the pro features are worth the price for him. Fortunately he has local backups of every photo, but it does feel like his photos have been held to ransom. He probably would be willing to pay some money (but less than the current pro) just for the extra storage (and none of the extra features), from what I understand.
To conclude this wall of text, I understand why they're doing it, and hopefully it will make Flickr sustainable, but I feel the way it was done will cause problems when it happens (if it only stopped an account from uploading if it had too many photos, that would help a lot to avoid link rot), and might also cause problems in the future (while morbid to think about, if a pro user dies, they won't be able to pay and a bunch of their images will just get deleted, which could be bad for their families)...
EDIT: fix a few spelling errors and tyops
UPDATE: my dad's response to this is that he will pay for pro to keep his images online. In general, he doesn't feel like Pro is intended for him because it has features he doesn't really care about, he only cares about the storage and community stuff, not the statistics and software stuff.
I didn't see any mention of deleting photos that were over the limit. Hopefully they do what Flickr used to do, which is make only the last 1000 photos publicly visible.
> 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.
"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."
What I find amazing is how quickly they are doing it. You'd think they would have 12 months type thing after the 'no upload' before they delete to maintain good will. What if someone is ill or travelling. Seems there will be a bunch of people who lose photos before they realise.
Well... It would have been nice if they warned people earlier because it is quite a big thing to happen.
A possible reason why someone running a website should care about keeping stuff up is to avoid link rot, to me it feels like part of bejng a good Internet citizen is to ensure that a change to your website doesn't break other websites or links where possible and reasonable. (if people want stuff removed, then that's fine though).
However, it might be that it's too expensive to even just keep stuff up, so fair enough, but if that is the case, I feel more warning would have helped a bit here.
I've been a Flickr Pro user for ages. Flickr was one of the things that got me into photography and improved my skills. I learned how to take better pictures by looking at other photos and seeing what kind of feedback mine got.
Then Yahoo aquired it and Flickr just fizzled out. I kept taking pictures but it wasn't the same without a community to share them with. It really made me sad.
I truly hope Flickr can return to the fantastic site it used to be and everything about this announcement reads like they have their head on straight.
If community == accounts with fewer photos,
and revenue == people willing to pay for more photos,
how does getting their revenue from the people who use Flickr in a way Flickr is trying to pivot from support furthering the goal of community?
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...
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.
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.
It took me awhile to figure out my old Yahoo login for Flickr. But I finally found it! (had to dig way back into my gmail archives). I definitely will be switching my login when that is rolled out.
As a paid SmugMug user, is there is discount for signing up for a paid flickr account? I saw that there is a discount to become a SmugMug user listed on Flickr Pro Perks.
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 think this is a positive step forward, actively planning to keep the service sustainable is a solid game plan.
Having more than 1000 pix means I'm now a pro member again, which I let lapse when storage went to 1 ter. Though, my ~38,000 pics only take up 5% of that terabyte. Some of those 2004 pictures are really tiny. Photography may not be as much of a focus for me now, but those early days were really engaging, here's hoping SM brings some of the magic back.
Having lots of pictures, and albums has made sorting, managing them much harder with the Organize browser tool. I'm interested how Smugmug will be improving the experience of managing photos and albums.
Will Organize be getting some of the new direction focus?
This was my thought exactly. There are hundreds of services out there that make your life just a little better or easier, and I can't afford them all. $50 just isn't worth it.
I think there's a strong case for creating an intermediate tier. $10 a year for 10k photos, but none of the other pro perks would be a pretty fair offer, I think. I'd sign up (well, not right away... I don't and won't have a Flickr account until I don't need a Yahoo address to get one.)
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?
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!
117 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadI have no interest in their Pro Statistics or the list of 'partner discounts' they bundle into Pro. Nor the ability to upload 10 minute videos.
Strip out that crap and just sell a Flickr Subscriber account for less money, please.
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.
Is Flickr worth 1.5x my monthly ISP cost? That's a trickier calculation.
Plus Flickr only bill in USD so my bank will charge a foreign-transaction fee too.
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?
I don't know what my dad will do, he's been using Flickr for quite a few years now, he used to pay for pro, but then stopped doing so after Yahoo bought Flickr and started breaking the UI. He has over 1000 photos, but I am not sure if the pro features are worth the price for him. Fortunately he has local backups of every photo, but it does feel like his photos have been held to ransom. He probably would be willing to pay some money (but less than the current pro) just for the extra storage (and none of the extra features), from what I understand.
To conclude this wall of text, I understand why they're doing it, and hopefully it will make Flickr sustainable, but I feel the way it was done will cause problems when it happens (if it only stopped an account from uploading if it had too many photos, that would help a lot to avoid link rot), and might also cause problems in the future (while morbid to think about, if a pro user dies, they won't be able to pay and a bunch of their images will just get deleted, which could be bad for their families)...
EDIT: fix a few spelling errors and tyops
UPDATE: my dad's response to this is that he will pay for pro to keep his images online. In general, he doesn't feel like Pro is intended for him because it has features he doesn't really care about, he only cares about the storage and community stuff, not the statistics and software stuff.
EDIT: correction, it says they'll first be hidden for about a month, then they will be "actively deleted".
It does say that if you were over 1000, you have a month where you can't upload any additional photos, but before they start deleting photos.
> 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.
From the home page.
Yahoo might have been able to afford it.
Otherwise pro user still paying for it. Everyone else didn't. Why should they care what people think of them who didn't pay anyway?
A possible reason why someone running a website should care about keeping stuff up is to avoid link rot, to me it feels like part of bejng a good Internet citizen is to ensure that a change to your website doesn't break other websites or links where possible and reasonable. (if people want stuff removed, then that's fine though).
However, it might be that it's too expensive to even just keep stuff up, so fair enough, but if that is the case, I feel more warning would have helped a bit here.
That's not how I'm reading it. It seems like it'll affect all Flickr users across the board.
I've been a Flickr Pro user for ages. Flickr was one of the things that got me into photography and improved my skills. I learned how to take better pictures by looking at other photos and seeing what kind of feedback mine got.
Then Yahoo aquired it and Flickr just fizzled out. I kept taking pictures but it wasn't the same without a community to share them with. It really made me sad.
I truly hope Flickr can return to the fantastic site it used to be and everything about this announcement reads like they have their head on straight.
Again, exactly the type of user they're trying to disuade from using their service...
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 mean, that's what they want it to be now, but I don't feel like that's what it was under Yahoo...
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.
As a paid SmugMug user, is there is discount for signing up for a paid flickr account? I saw that there is a discount to become a SmugMug user listed on Flickr Pro Perks.
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...
Having more than 1000 pix means I'm now a pro member again, which I let lapse when storage went to 1 ter. Though, my ~38,000 pics only take up 5% of that terabyte. Some of those 2004 pictures are really tiny. Photography may not be as much of a focus for me now, but those early days were really engaging, here's hoping SM brings some of the magic back.
Having lots of pictures, and albums has made sorting, managing them much harder with the Organize browser tool. I'm interested how Smugmug will be improving the experience of managing photos and albums.
Will Organize be getting some of the new direction focus?
But other than that I am 100% on-board with this strategy. Get done with the "free" accounts already.
Haven't bother to go through the T&C but I hope they have clause that say they are not allowed to use your data for data-mining/advertising.
I think there's a strong case for creating an intermediate tier. $10 a year for 10k photos, but none of the other pro perks would be a pretty fair offer, I think. I'd sign up (well, not right away... I don't and won't have a Flickr account until I don't need a Yahoo address to get one.)
But, .... it seems like they're jumping the gun here. I went to go resign up for Pro but you still have to do it through your Yahoo account!!!
I don't want yahoo even associated with my flickr account but I could find no way to disassociate the yahoo account.
Shouldn't they fix that before rolling out this change?
(or maybe I missed how)
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).