Fourteen years ago I discovered an little fantastic service called Flickr. Made by photo enthusiasts. It was later sold to Yahoo, and now recently to Smugmug. I have been waiting for Smugmugs business model to rub in to thw Flickr brand, and now it’s that time. PAY OR WE WILL DELETE YOUR PICTURES.
Flickr is not an ordinary storage site, it was until now, the place to go to look at and find great pictures.
This article says it all:
Flickr to delete millions of photos as it reduces allowance for free users
The new price is $49 a year. My reaction was to download my pictures, and as soon as they are downloaded, to close and cancel my account.
Now to my question, what do you use to show off your best pictures? I know about Instagram and Google Photos. Anything else?
Whaaat?? No notice from SmugMug in my inbox yet. Thanks for the heads up. I was fine with the $25 yearly Flickr pro account, but no way am I paying $49.
Smugmug is actually a very well respected company. I don’t need their pro plan but I think that their pricing is fair compared to their costs, and compared to the prices of Smugmug itself ($40-$360/yr depending on plan) and competitors like Zenfolio, or 500px, or Photoshelter, etc.
Bargain/quality is Google Photos (unlimited jpegs for free, or higher quality photos via Google Drive storage, which charges a monthly fee after 15 gigabytes — $1.99 a month for 100 GB and $9.99 a month for 1 terabyte.) Amazon Photos and iCloud and OneDrive follow behind. But Flickr is photo album-oriented, and is pretty good about private and public albums, and comments, and forums. I think you generally get what you pay for, though I understand that people don’t like to pay anything (except perhaps by having their personal interests and data quietly skimmed).
FYI when Flickr started free accounts would only display the last uploaded 100 photos, and Pro accounts cost $59.99/year. So, after years of Yahoo subsidization (and stagnation) Smugmug’s Flickr offers a way forward that while hopefully being sustainable for the owners is still more generous than when the service began.
One of the reasons Flickr lost its shine in recent years can be traced to Yahoo’s offering 1Tb free storage - it actually helped wreck the community aspect of the site as it became flooded with tons of bad publicly visible pics, making the site more and more an Imgur and a place for backups instead of a place for a community of people showing off photos and discussing photography, which made finding and discussing the better pics more difficult, and drove away droves of people who were active in groups and discussions.
Thomas Hawk recently recently wrote,
"One of the things I noticed after Flickr began offering 1 terabyte for free to users was that many users simply began using Flickr as a backup site for all of their photos. Instead of sharing their best photos with a community, they simply dumped everything on their hard drive to Flickr and left and went away. These photos were then indexed for search and populated the service littering it with low quality content (screengrabs, 1,000 bad photos in a row of fireworks, 3,000 poorly composed photos in a row of somebody’s sister’s wedding, etc.).
