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Flickr Starts Culling Users' Photos (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the FYI dept.

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.

5 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Google photos by fred6666 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This will increase the migration speed from Flickr to Google Photos. I doubt many people will switch to the paid version.

    1. Re:Google photos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Google photos by ctilsie242 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. 1TB wow, I missed out! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    If I had known there was a free service with that much space I would have been backing up to it.

    Why yes, my photos are very large, abstract, and look like noise. That's because they were painted by AI.

  3. It is not one-sided by Solandri · · Score: 3, Informative

    The situation is symmetrical. In a free service, both sides have the same power. At any time, you are allowed to quit using the free service and sign up with a different service. There is nothing the service can do to prevent you from leaving. Likewise, at any time, the free service is allowed to quit offering the service under its original conditions, and re-offer it under different conditions. And there is nothing you can do to prevent this.

    The only way to prevent this is to pay for the service for a period of time specified in a contract. Payment constitutes consideration - something given up in exchange for receiving something - and thus creates a binding contract. So if you agree to pay for it for a year (with penalties if you fail to pay), you can lock in the terms and conditions for the duration of your service contract. That's why when a cellular carrier changes their terms and conditions, it releases you from any multi-year contract you may have signed up for. Most carriers instead opt to "grandfather" you in under the old terms and conditions for the duration of your contract to avoid this.

    Without consideration, there is no contract, and neither side is obligated to maintain the original agreement terms in perpetuity. (Be careful of this if you let your apartment rent switch to month-to-month. That can be advantageous if you plan to move out in a few months. But if you're planning to stay, it means the landlord can kick you out and replace you with a different tenant. If you wish to stay for a long time, it is in your best interests to negotiate a year-long or multi-year lease.)