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Flickr is Ditching Yahoo Account Requirement and Giving Pro Subscribers Unlimited Storage (venturebeat.com)
Flickr announced a handful of updates to its platform and business model today -- the first major changes since SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting community from Oath earlier this year. From a report: Arguably the most interesting -- and welcome -- facet of today's announcement is that Flickr will no longer require users to sign-in with their Yahoo account credentials. However, not all the news is good -- those with free accounts will no longer have 1 terabyte of storage for all their photos. Many people speculated about what would happen to the formerly Yahoo-owned image-hosting platform when Yahoo became part of Verizon's family in 2017. While Verizon bundled AOL and Yahoo under the Oath banner, Flickr started shedding features and services, and its future did not look bright. But Flickr still claims north of 100 million monthly users, which is why SmugMug came a-callin' in April. In short, Flickr still holds a lot of potential if managed correctly.
Fast-forward to today, and Flickr has now revealed its new model for free and Pro-account users. Ditching Yahoo accounts from the log-in page will almost the most welcome part of today's news for millions, and as SmugMug notes in its announcement, it is among the most requested changes it has had since it took over Flickr. The change won't take affect until January, 2019, however, so for now a Yahoo account is still mandatory.
Fast-forward to today, and Flickr has now revealed its new model for free and Pro-account users. Ditching Yahoo accounts from the log-in page will almost the most welcome part of today's news for millions, and as SmugMug notes in its announcement, it is among the most requested changes it has had since it took over Flickr. The change won't take affect until January, 2019, however, so for now a Yahoo account is still mandatory.
Also, double the cost for pro accounts :(
It wasn't very clear from the summary, but the change to support 5K means whatever resolution your original image is, it will be rendered at up to 5K on the web site when viewing (people can also download the even larger original if you allow them).
They will also be supporting wide color profiles which makes a ton of sense, so I could post an image in AdobeRGB and having it display it much wider than sRGB gamut across most modern systems... I wonder if other photo platforms support that as well? Not sure.
I've been on Flickr as a pro user for ages (props to Flickr for keeping that level around all the time they have) and all of these changes sound great to me. 1000k photos is very fair for a free level.
I agree with them that no other platform is as good at really embracing photography, to me even 500px is not as good as exploring and browsing really great photos. For me part of that is Flickr has always been good about understanding that photography is a technical and artistic mix, so they make it easy to see as large a version of the photo as possible, while still also putting the technical details right up front and easy to view.
I'm really excited about the future of Flickr by people that really do seem to care about the user base and are truly acting in support of photography.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What do you get that way? That people will suddenly use their Yahoo/GMail/Facebook account that you force them to create? No. They will sign up for that one single reason and never use it for anything but to log in to your site.
There is exactly one good reason to do this, and that is to offload user management to someone else if your user already have to have an account there to use your system. Those occasions are few and far between, the only thing I can think of is a gaming addon site for a steam game that lets you log in with your steam account.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why can't someone come up with a photo backup service that is not intended for sharing, encrypts photos on the client before being sent up, and has a EULA that does not cede ownership to the cloud provider, so your stuff doesn't wind up a stock photo.
This isn't rocket science. The client app turns on when location changes, checks the Photos directory or Camera Roll, uses gpg/netpgp to encrypt images, and then uploads the .gpg files. For viewing, the app can download and decrypt photos to a local cache.
Key management is simple. It can use a passphrase you set on the device, as well as a private key that the device stores in the Keychain. That way, decryption is automatic, and if the device is lost, you get prompted for your passphrase, and your photos are still accessible.
Sounds like a great service that you should build.
It's 1000 photos not 1000k (a million).
My bad, was thinking of typing 1k but I seem to have added the zeros.
in 8 years at 10 a month you hit the limit. So it's not really useful for anyone wanting to share.
That seems like a huge amount of time and photos to allow for someone only paying through ads, more than enough to determine you really want the pro level.
Remember that part of Flickr's goal is that they do not want people sticking around who are not really into photography, because they had been kind of a dumping bin for some people. 1000 photos is a good compromise where you can upload a lot of stuff, and keep pruning for quite a while to upload new content if you really care even without going pro. And as far as I understand those 1000 photos could be any size and display at full quality.
Google Photos is a much more suitable option for low photo / month users.
I agree in terms of casual users just uploading random photos. For someone really serious about photography, Google Photos stinks at sharing and viewing them.
You'd have to be a real "pro" to really justify $50 for the storage - so actually the other benefits to Pro are still the main selling point.
Yes I agree, but even at the updated price it seems like a decent value to me for the features they are working on.
I wish they would have given existing Pro users a bit of a price break though - I was just renewed last month at $50, currently if you sign up as a new Pro member you get 30% off. Ah well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
isn't that something that can be done with a flash drive or removable hard drive?
Although I agree there is a case to be made for a service exactly as you describe, Flickr Pro could be used like that:
1) Unlimited storage, and unlimited photo original size. As soon as they support 5k and expanded color gamuts I'll probably be uploading TIFF files anyway.
2) On Flickr you can mark any photo with varying levels of access including non-public.
3) Flickr does not sell your photos. I think they may scan them automatically for auto-tagging, you may be able to disable that.
In fact I already back up my camera photo roll to Flickr, (the mobile app offers that option) where all photos are non-public and just sit there.
As for encryption, I would personally prefer not to encrypt backups as it seems like another good way to lose a backup. But I can see your point that lots of people would like that option.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm pretty sure "PRO" users have had unlimited storage for some time now.
What is different is that PRO accounts now seem to cost $50 per annum, as opposed to $25 per annum, with no improvements to service.
That's news-worthy, IMHO!
My UID is prime!
So let's go over this business plan.
1. Photo backup service that is not intended for sharing, encrypts photos on the client before being sent up, and has a EULA that does not cede ownership to the cloud provider,
2. ???
3. Profit
You're missing step 2 there Sparky.
i.e. How are you going to pay for the servers / bandwidth / back-end ? People have been conditioned that "free is good enough" not realizing THEY are the product.
How many people _actually_ care about your service? Because it sure isn't the mass market.
2. ???
You pay for the service?
I think Adobe's "Creative Cloud" already offers some form of this. (Though not sure about the "client side encrypt" part.)
Unfortunately, free-but-encumbered is always going to be orders of magnitude more popular than anything that users have to pay for, regardless of how little may be charged for it.
The last time I looked around at the various options (many years ago, I'll admit), it was somewhat unclear where exactly I should post my photos. At the time, it kinda felt like:
SmugMug - If I want an aesthetically pleasing gallery, that's organized and easy to browse. But no social features.
Flickr - If I want public social interaction on my photos, with gallery organization as an afterthought
Facebook - If I want my friends to actually know I took any photos at all, because they'll never notice them if posted elsewhere. Oh, and social interaction from said friends.
My own gallery site - Similar to SmugMug, but not as pretty
Today, I really don't know where to post anything. Most of it just winds up on FB, because that's the only place anyone will notice it.
I went through the same evaluation as you (also looked at 500px, which I just never liked the interface of, and Instagram, which I use but really hate the interface of).
A good solution these days is to post to Flickr first, then post that Flickr link to Facebook as Facebook parses it pretty well. That way the users get a much nicer viewing experience when they click on the photo as they are taken to Flickr.
Someday I'd love to do my own gallery site but if I do one it would probably end up being a thin shell around a core Flickr gallery...
I don't think Flickr photo albums are that much of an afterthought, I like how they work, and that I can have a photo in multiple groups.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One thing that would really help, is if the "social interaction" could be tied to the content itself... And not the site someone first notices the content on.
Of course this would require some level of protocol/backend cooperation between all these sites, which we know will never happen.
(Only underdogs seem to want to play well with others, as the dominant players rarely have any incentive to bother.)
Hopefully they will get around to properly re-developing the AppleTV app to support tvOS (something Yahoo never got around to) I require my Flickr library as my HDTV screensaver!
I sort of agree, but on the other hand whatever I share on Facebook I'm generally fine with the comments staying there... if you are putting in the Flickr link the viewer has the option of where to put the comments. So non-serious viewers will just see the smaller image on Facebook and comment there, which is fine, but anyone wanting to take a better look will go to Flickr to view and probably comment there. It seems like that would lead to more serious comments (or at least comments from more serious viewers) on Flickr which is what I want...
One thing I have always wanted to do though is to put together a scraper that would collect comments on a photo from multiple sources and store them all locally, for future reference. That would be pretty cool.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That would be greta to have an updated HDTV Flickr app. I wonder if they have plans to enhance the Flickr API's for third party support...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I like owning my own photos THANKS, you corporate dicksucking whores of /.
Could you back up your phone's camera roll to your PC, then subscribe to Tarsnap to back that up to a server?
Also, for free accounts that currently have more than 1000 images, they're going to delete them from the site until you do have just 1000 images, starting with the oldest first. It's also worth pointing out that you lose the titles, the descriptions, the on-image notes, the comments, the presence in the groups. This is a huge hit.
It's still worse yet. They've made downloading your images to save them a huge task; when you go to the download page to get your images, after you take the time to select all of them (and yes, you have to do that) when you finally ask to download a zip of all of them, it says "Whoa! That's a lot of images!" and refuses; but it doesn't warn you first, so your time selecting them all the first time through is wasted (it's a lot of time for thousands of images, too), and so then you have to go back and re-select just a few and then download them in small groups. It's a royal PITA. It took me quite a few hours to do about 2,500 images. It should have been just:
1 Select All
2 Are You Sure (YES)
3 Wait For Archive(s) to be created
4 Download
However, sucky and broken as the existing process is, I got it done, and I won't using Flickr any longer. It's definitely time to go back to the ol' personal web site where destructive types aren't altering terms of service in such a way as to hose existing users. And yes, in fact I do have a Flickr Pro account, but (a) I'm not going to suddenly be paying twice as much for it, and (b) I'm definitely not supporting a "service" that dumps all that existing work by its users. That's just fucking rude. It is also, I would note, a one of the significant missteps that killed Digg.
Those people's older images should be grandfathered in. Period. Going into the future, sure, make your changes. But tossing out people's images? Hell no. SmugMug's being a complete dick here.
This is just a push to make free users to become Pro paying users. 1000 photos is nothing if you use Flicks as a backup for you phone camera. God, I did not want to do Google Photo but looks like I'm being pushed there. Thanks Flickr, you were good, but nothing good lasts long.
Well, I'm going to be busy downloading my photos. Looks like some sort of lock-in policy from the new owners.
I hope we'll be able to access our abandoned accounts from before Yahoo became mandatory...
Sigh. I miss GameNeverending.
What part of that "photo backup service" isn't just a backup service?