Flickr to remove free accounts their content when exceeding 1000 photos

[Densha]

According to their new policies, free Flickr accounts will soon be limited to 1000 photos. Those with more than 1000 photos will see their oldest content deleted from 5 February 2019.

 

Quote

Free accounts will soon be limited to 1,000 photos or videos. Flickr isn’t Flickr without the contributions and participation of our free members, and we remain committed to a vibrant free offering.

 

If you are a free member with more than 1,000 photos or videos, you will have ample time to upgrade to Pro (for 30% off your first year) or download your photos and videos.* Read more about this decision.

 

*Free members with more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded to Flickr have until Tuesday, January 8, 2019, to upgrade to Pro or download content over the limit. After January 8, 2019, members over the limit will no longer be able to upload new photos to Flickr. After February 5, 2019, free accounts that contain over 1,000 photos or videos will have content actively deleted -- starting from oldest to newest date uploaded -- to meet the new limit.

 

Source: https://www.flickr.com/lookingahead/

[bill937ca]

More info on the changes:

 

https://petapixel.com/2018/11/01/flickr-limits-free-plan-to-1000-photos-upgrades-pro-members/?fbclid=IwAR1sOIayJeRIfARoJLA8nm4CSmtqGA-bEjTH6dFXIUDIQvhFC49JYD8_Ud0

 

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/1/18051950/flickr-1000-photo-limit-free-accounts-changes-pro-subscription-smugmug?fbclid=IwAR1f1TfZXq78lEu-5je5i14fS3llnxMqeLR08ZgBr9PkvSwax74a43S0pC0

Edited November 1, 2018 by bill937ca

[kvp]

First all old photos from google earth and now this...

 

Although in theory it's possible to split the pictures between multiple accounts as long as the company doesn't recognize it.

[Densha]

12 minutes ago, kvp said:

First all old photos from google earth and now this...

I tried looking up about Google Earth, but cannot find anything about it. Mind sharing a link about it?

 

It does really feel like Flickr pulled a Photobucket...

[cteno4]

They gotta make money and advertising is not doing it these days with all the ad placement possibilities there are now days. I’ve always figured unlimited will last a year or two even when paid and then some restriction will creep in. Amazon storage did this as well a year or two back as well, promise paid unlimited and then cut way back and force most all to a stepped pay system.

 

did google want only new stuff now on google earth? I can see them falling to the social media living only in the moment... history was only yesterday.

 

jeff

[katoftw]

Much better than photo bucket though.  Everyone had to pay (whether 1 photo or 1000) and every photo link was destroyed.

 

At least flickr are giving you 1000 free.  An everyday casual user shouldn't get near that amount.

[Das Steinkopf]

I have been a member of Flickr for over 10 years now, when I first joined I had a free account and back then the limit was 200 photos so after a year or two I decided to change to a Pro account due to the growing collection of photos I have, I think it would be pretty hard for someone to complain that they can only upload 1000 photo's with a free account.

[Kiha66]

At the very least I am thankful they are giving people plenty of time to get their old photos before the change comes into effect, and not having it as a surprise and holding them hostage like photobucket did.

[kvp]

10 hours ago, Densha said:

I tried looking up about Google Earth, but cannot find anything about it. Mind sharing a link about it?

 

It does really feel like Flickr pulled a Photobucket...

Google earth had a panoramio and a picasa view based on geotagged photos. All users got a chance to migrate their photos to other google services (like google+ or google photos), but all inactive users (like decesed ones) got their albums permanently deleted. I assume google+ users, if they are still around have to migrate somewhere in the near future too.

 

This removed a rather large amount of historic photos, like in case of a certain austrian railway line, almost all of them, done by someone in the 70ies-80ies, uploaded with location info when google earth started and couldn't be contacted for years. All of these photos have been removed and probably destroyed.

 

Imho this brings up an ethical question: if a digital service has photos with questionable and hard to solve copyright status, but historical value, what should they do with them? Personally if they are removed, they should be still preserved somewhere. There are no laws for this, like the publishing law in hungary that for any publications above a rather low threshold, the publisher has to give one to the national library for archival. (lately digital copies are also accepted) These publications are then made available for research.

 

Imho there is a rather huge data loss happening in the recent years and often historical photos are disappearing, where the hard copy seems to be already lost and the digital upload is the last existing variant. It's not like book publishing where you could probably locate a copy with some effort, most of the time the shut down service has the only existing copy.

 

Imho the same is true for rolling back free space. Imho the ethical approach would have been to leave the photos there but lock any additions above the 1000 images threshold for publicly accessible photos.

[cteno4]

Photo preservation really is in the hands of the photo owners. If they choose to destroy they can. It’s sad they don’t keep up the proper archiving, but I don’t see countries starting to force a historical archive on individuals or storage services or force them to give to the public domain if they don’t plan to maintain them. Time does trip public domain, but unless published in a more traditional route that then gets entered into national and academic archives its easier to go poof. These are private companies doing the storage and folks have agreed to the terms of service which don’t guarantee archival storage in perpetuity. The companies are in business to make money and it’s not up to them to decide what is maintained as historical and pay for that service out of their own pockets and the pockets of the paying customers forever. It’s not about ethics as if they don’t make a profit they will be gone and all the electrons set free anyway.

 

this is an issue of the digital world. It’s developed so quickly that little thought has been done about archiving and the rapid increase in the sheer amount to be archived makes it worse. With film you thought before your finger went down and then when the slide box came you tossed most of them and kept the best. Now it’s take a gazillion 20mp photos and keep em all! Computers, devices, storage systems and digital archive services change so rapidly folks tend to forget fast (or flat out don’t know) where all their pictures are, let along sort, cull, or catalog them much. On the grand scale a similar situation is happening of the ever evolving technology of the best long term digital archival storage formats and substraits.

 

ive been working in computers for over 40 year now (and I’m ancient!) and have had a litany of digital storage systems and have tried to be good at bringing things forward each time things made a big change but I never had time to do it all at each revolution. File systems, os, and software changes have also trapped a lot of old content at one point or another. While there is a lot of stuff I wished I could have archived better from big educational and museum projects and brought forward, when I objectively thin about it there is little that is/was really useful to.

 

But even if a physical slide/negative/print archive there is good chance older stuff canneasily go poof with a bit of time. We have had several estates contact us about train photo archives. We have taken in some of them and we have permission to use and release them, but it takes a lot of work to digitize and catalog them to get them out to others. And then our club won’t be around forever. But if we didn’t step up they would be in landfill right now. Once recent collection had about 25 boxes of slides, prints and negatives. Misty of the Baltimore ight Rail construction in the 70-90s. While of historical value, it was difficult for the estate to find a home for all of these. MTA and several local clubs said don’t throw those out they are of great historical value, but I’m not sure any ended up stepping up and really doing anything with the collection. I went thru about 5 boxes to try to find any more Japanese stuff but none there so I at least tried to categorize what was there, but I don’t think anyone else tried. It’s one thing to say save that, but it’s another to have the space to store it correctly, and then try to do something to make it accessible. Academic institutions are flooded constantly with this sort of stuff and have to be picky as they have very limited budgets for archiving. I work with archivists a lot on projects and they bemoan this a lot, but realize you can’t save it all. It also takes a lot of time and effort just to triage, let alone research and catalog. Digital archiving is still in its infancy and institutions still working on standards, it will be an ongoing task as long as the digital content formats keep evolving.

 

archiving is tricky as it’s like life in that you want to experience it well in the moment and get the best out of it and take a little bit of the best of it forward, but if you try to take it all forward with you you end up with an evergrowing snow ball younare trapped in and can’t experience the moment well any longer.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[kvp]

Jeff, you are right, but i still think that information that is in digital form is rather easy to just donate. No need to catalog it, that can be done later or semi automatically. I would like to share three links from hungary as examples of what could be done with a bit of effort:

a creative commons based photo archive using donated and lieterally found on the street material, ran by a foundation, mostly voluenteer tagged:  http://www.fortepan.hu

and a government funded free aerial photo archive based on old national archives, voluenteer processed and tagged: http://www.fentrol.hu (this is very similar to the historic view of google earth but goes back to ww2)

and the national library's digital database, mostly government fundend: http://www.oszk.hu/mek (they are try to share everything that could be shared legally, similar to the library of congress archives)

 

Mostly the idea is to archive now, just to get the info into a digital form as long as the original analog form exist, then duplicate the archives to different physical locations, get them online and mostly let the viewers sort out what is what later. Turns out most of the time consuming process is labeling, which is really hard when there is no extra info included with the photos, but just scanning what little is available and letting viewers process it is really cost effective.

[cteno4]

I thing the challenge is finding the groups that can manage archives both physical and digital for the long term as well as finding the volunteer power to do the work are the greatest issues. Many fan organizations like train clubs are really notmset up well to manage archives in the long run, and it can be like pulling fingernails to get volunteers to scan and at least annotate with any data that was with the hard copies. I’ve done these kids of projects both volunteer and professionally and they can get daunting fast. 

 

What would be wonderful is an archival non profit to be around with a good endowment to preserve digital collections way into the furture along with angood universal cataloging system. Orgs could put proposals to enter their historical collections into the master archive and allow a better universal cataloging of any content with the media. 

 

Finding a place ro donate images can be hard, that’s why we get contacted now and then, but folks say it too then a while to find us.

 

we have an interesting digitizing project being done by our youngest member. He’s finishing his Boy Scout eagles project and is managing a bunch of his friends to digitize a collection 5 boxes of old Japanese railfan and modeling magizines from the 60-80s. The problem we have is what we can do with it as it’s all under copyright, but there are probably few copies around outside Japan and none in library collections. We can’t post it online and even for club use it’s sort of stretching fair use for the digital. But we figured it would be good for a digital archive to be around of the material anyway and he was interested in doing the project. At some point we may try to track down the current copyright holder to see if it could be posted pubically. Lots of great history, photos and plans in them! But this does bring up the issue of is it worth our time to digitize something like this under copyright when there is little we could do with it for the next 30 odd years.

 

Jeff

[kvp]

It looks like US copyright law is more restrictive than in the EU. In Hungary for example fair use means if it's for non profit research or educational purposes, then copyright does not apply, as long as it's properly attributed and not modified or reused without the owner's permission. Something along the lines of the CC-BY-NC-ND. This allows research and educational archives to exist. Not ideal, but better than nothing.

 

Did you or anyone else take the Baltimore light rail archives in the end? I would have probably said that please contact us again if nobody else takes it. Even if you just end up putting up the lot for sale at a symbolic price to get it to someone who actually wants it. Could you get an update on it?

[bill937ca]

In many cases those wanting to donate photographic collections to railway museums need to offer a sizable donation to the group to have the items accepted.  That way somebody like a student can be hired to do the archiving and inventory.

[cteno4]

I’m not sure if eu copyright would allow you to put up digital copies of a copyrighted publications like this open to the public on the web under the guise of it being archival. This is what tripped up google books. But I’ve not researched eu stuff much in the last few years as not doing much publishing stuff anymore.

 

I would not have touched the mta collection, it was 20+ large boxes and counting as they went thru the house. Way too much to deal with and would require so much work to even roughly go thru and of really no great interest to me or anyone in our club. someone at the Maryland rail authority was saying the collection of the mta stuff should be saved and was going to come and look at it but I’m not sure if they ever followed thru. We took the small pile of Japanese stuff (couple hundred 2x2 b/w negatives and some 16mm film from 50-70s bus, rail and streetcars). I was not going to take the 20+ large boxes of the mta and other rr slides home! I just helped the person managing the estate sort thru some of the boxes (each with 250+ boxed of 36 slides!) for an afternoon to repay them giving is the japan stuff. I’ve sorted tens of thousands of slides in my life and this collection was really tedious. The estate had a limited time as the house needed to be cleared out for sale and I never heard what the final outcome of the rest of the collection.

 

This is usually the case that there is a very limited time to act when collections like this come up and thus hard to make the right connections or planning time. Small estates rarely give any funds for collection archiving, it has to be part of a will. Once the estate is being probated money can’t be spent on things like this if not part of the will and even then carefully. Some estates actually look to sell photo collections thinking they have monetary value (which the executor of the estate is bound to get best money out of estate within reason) and you have to tell them no not really worth monetary value even if historically interesting unless they have a spectacular collection. We can’t take money really anyway as our club is just an unincorporated association so we don’t legally have any financial body, you would need a non profit to take in and archiving funding bequest.

 

when we got the Japanese magazines from another estate we had like 12 boxes of all sorts of Japanese transportation stuff thrown at us as well from 50s-90s. Everything from bus schedules to odd reports and tourist pamphlets (the chap worked for us transportation Dept and went to japan every other year and had collections like this from all over the world). We had to weed out a lot of this as we could not store all this stuff and could not find others interested. Shipping to others would have been prohibitive as well. While I’m sure interesting stuff to some, trying to digitize this stuff and catalog and present for others to enjoy would have been nice but wayyyy to much work for anyone to do. I have a box of the best of that hopefully sometime I can digitize some to put up.

 

Again its easy to say save that, but in practice finding someone that wants it can be very difficult and even if someone wants it many times they can’t handle dealing with even getting and storing stuff let alone cataloging and digitizing...

 

jeff

Edited November 3, 2018 by cteno4

[nah00]

On 11/2/2018 at 5:14 PM, kvp said:

Imho there is a rather huge data loss happening in the recent years and often historical photos are disappearing, where the hard copy seems to be already lost and the digital upload is the last existing variant. It's not like book publishing where you could probably locate a copy with some effort, most of the time the shut down service has the only existing copy.

 

I get more than few people asking me (especially with regards to railroad subjects 'Why do you still buy books? The pictures are all online and you can read everything there too'. I generally tell them 'yes, I can, for now'. Having a physical copy (while taking up much more space) is to me more valuable than a digital copy. Also a lot of subjects seem to be covered much better in print form than in digital form, having something that was edited for accuracy and readability is important. 

[bill937ca]

An update from Flickr:

 

https://links.flickr.com/e/evib?_t=40ac9f0c38d540238d36950e58265982&_m=a1d1807b0ca64ea0be66c353ca52cda2&_e=CEu3bb3aDKykhTX22gBOIkt0bE71GueH2njv1Mue-lPXu7Fasr8fuu-LCHiKj--QLzXoU4YRD7TZh96rOsHeB-qP0FWW_9qjL6Kq6c05m2MRWxjlrTqLrADH0u3PFKAD

 

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Why? We’ve spent 17 years lovingly building our company into a thriving, family-owned and -operated business that cares deeply about photographers. SmugMug has always been the place for photographers to showcase their photography, and we’ve long admired how Flickr has been the community where they connect with each other. We couldn’t stand by and watch Flickr vanish.

 

So we took a big risk, stepped in, and saved Flickr. Together, we created the world’s largest photographer-focused community: a place where photographers can stand out and fit in. And yet, Flickr—the world’s most-beloved, money-losing business—still needs your help.

 

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We need more Flickr Pro members if we want to keep the Flickr dream alive, and we need your help to share the story of Flickr.

 

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Flickr is the world’s largest photographer-focused community. It’s the world’s best way to find great photography and connect with amazing photographers. Flickr hosts some of the world’s most iconic, most priceless photos, freely available to the entire world. This community is home to more than 100 million accounts and tens of billions of photos. It serves billions of photos every single day. It’s huge. It’s a priceless treasure for the whole world. And it costs money to operate. Lots of money.

 

As you know, Flickr is the best value in photo sharing anywhere in the world. Flickr Pro members get ad-free browsing for themselves and their visitors, advanced stats, unlimited full-quality storage for all their photos, plus premium features and access to the world’s largest photographer-focused community.

 

Please, help us spread the word. Help us make Flickr thrive. Help us ensure Flickr has a bright future. Every Flickr Pro subscription goes directly to keeping Flickr alive and creating great new experiences for photographers like you. We are building lots of great things for the Flickr community, but we need your help. We can do this together.

 

We’re launching our end-of-year Pro subscription campaign on Thursday, December 26, but I want to give you a coupon code to share with friends, family, or anyone who shares your love of photography and community so they can enjoy the same 25% discount before the campaign starts.

 

We’ve gone to great lengths to optimize Flickr for cost savings wherever possible, but the increasing cost of operating this enormous community and continuing to invest in its future will require a small price increase early in the new year, so this is truly the very best time to help everyone upgrade to a Pro membership.

 

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Please share coupon code 25in2019 or link below to give the gift of 25% off Flickr Pro now.

https://www.flickr.com/account/upgrade/pro?coupon=25in2019

Edited December 21, 2019 by bill937ca

[cteno4]

There is no free lunch

 

although Facebook and google would like us to believe that... (I know this comment has been noted somewhere in their databases, time to put on the aluminum foil hat!)

 

jeff