Thursday, February 7, 2019

If you use Flickr, download your images right away


It seems that Flickr is reducing the storage provided to non-paying users of its facilities.

The company said months ago that it planned to whittle free accounts down from a terabyte to only 1,000 images and delete the rest on Feb. 5. After that, if users wanted to post more photos to the site, they would have to purchase a Flickr Pro account that would run them $50 annually. Flickr announced these changes back in November as part of an overhaul to focus on paid subscriptions after it was purchased by SmugMug last year.

But despite giving users plenty of time to prepare for this massive photo purge, many were—hm, let’s say unprepared ... Some users also reported getting error messages while they were attempting to download their photos, which the company seemed to imply in its statement Wednesday was part of the reason it pushed the deadline back to March 12. Needless to say, some Flickr users seemed genuinely pleased to have another month to get this squared away.

For a step-by-step guide for how to download your photos, we’ve got you covered right here. But photo nerds, seriously, this is your last chance.

There's more at the link.

I don't use Flickr myself, but I know many people who do.  You've got less than a month to download your images, after which you may lose them - or most of them, at any rate.

Peter

7 comments:

Old NFO said...

Interesting... And not surprising.

SiGraybeard said...

Did you read the email from Blogger (Google) about Google+ going away?

"Photos and videos from Google+ in your Album Archive and your Google+ pages will also be deleted. You can download and save your content, just make sure to do so before April. Note that photos and videos backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted."

We can do that apparently until April 2nd. I don't think I deliberately put any blog pictures there, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google thought I did. I can see pictures going away.

Beans said...

It's almost as if relying on someone else to store stuff for you is a bad idea...

Hey, wait, I need to talk to OldAFSarge about his blog.

Wonder how soon Blogger is going to start cutting storage of old content.

taminator013 said...

I don't understand why people would store all their stuff like that without having a backup at home. I have about a kajillian songs and pictures on a 320 gigabyte, external hard drive that's about the size of a pack of cigarettes..........

Cedar said...

Thank you for reminding me! I actually do want and will use Flickr, but as a photographer, I'm a semi-pro, so the annual charge is a business expense. Plus, it's a tertiary backup along with my physical external drive in-house. For most people, it's probably not something they will want to pay for.

paladin3001 said...

Over ten years ago, my ISP came bundled with a Flickr Pro account. After that partnership lapsed I kept the pro account and paid for it. Than that witch who took over Yahoo messed things up. Still kept my pro account though for reasons. Good thing too. There's a gap in my photo storage at home that's filled in my stuff I posted on Flickr.

As to the time limit. I have only received something like ten e-mails about it since they made the original announcement. So people panicking now? No sympathy from this quarter.

Cedar said...

Paladin3001 Yes, I've gotten at least that many emails. I just kept putting it off until I was sure I wanted to do it, and then forgot because stuff. But that's no excuse for panic.