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Flickr Starts Culling Users' Photos (bbc.com)
Photo-sharing website Flickr is starting to delete users' photos after changing its terms and conditions. The firm announced in November that it would no longer be allowing its members one terabyte of free storage. From a report: Under the new rules, there is a limit of 1,000 photographs for those who do not subscribe to the service at a cost of $49.99 per year. One terabyte would store around 200,000 photos with an average size of 5MB. Flickr was acquired by another photo platform called SmugMug in April 2018. The price it paid to former owner Verizon was not disclosed. In a blog in November announcing the changes, Flickr said that "storing tens of billions of Flickr members' photos is staggeringly expensive". It also said by introducing the free storage in 2013, Flickr's original owner Yahoo had "lost sight of what made Flickr truly special" as new users were attracted by the storage rather than the photography.
Or it might be that the business model of giving away storage space and bandwidth is not viable, at least it isn't if you aren't part of the Google/Facebook advertising hegemony.
The patience of investors holds out for only so long. In the near future the wheels will probably come off lot of more of these .com 2.0 models that thought they could pay bills with clicks.
I never used Flickr in the first place. You get what you pay for, so my photos are on a cloud provider I paid for, or on an AWS virtual machine. Either way, I'm the customer, not the product.
I just don't trust "free" providers.