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.

Comments

It's even worse

[Anonymous Coward]

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.