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  • Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!

Flickr to change their free offer.

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
Flickr, the photo sharing site several members use for the image posted here, announced today that they will restrict their free offer to a library of 1000 pictures.

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

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.
 

nicolas claris

OPF Co-founder/Administrator
Come, come to me little children, nice chickens, my arms are wide open, the table is set: you can serve and invite your friends for free!

Later…
Oh my dear babies, you are so many to use my services, it is very good but it is the time to checkout, now that you are a lot to use my services, you have to pay!

You have become used to working with me, it will be difficult to change the system and especially to make it clear to your interlocutors that they will have to change their habits if they still want to be close to you…
You have given your fans, your customers, your prospects the habit of consulting your images at my home: you are prisoners!
You used to use my system to post your images on your favorite forums, if you do not pay, they will disappear ...

Once again: if it's free, it's you the customer!
We must really believe that what is free on the Internet is ... for free!

As for me, no worries, I do not use free services, I like to check what happens to my photos ... I pay but I am free ...
For other Internet services as Google, clouds, I’m aware of what I give to them… (too much anyway)
 

Peter Dexter

Well-known member
I started off using Photobucket when they first opened their door sometime around 2002 and of course they were free. Some time later I was finding that when I linked an image to a forum the image quality in the post was distinctly inferior to the original. Some one told me that wasn't an issue with Flicker. I tried it and indeed there seemed to be no loss in image quality. Photobucket started charging big time of course a while ago. It was inevitable that Flicker would too at some point. In their explanation they state that 97% of their "free" users have less than a thousand images. That I doubt but still that number seems reasonably generous. Photobucket's Beginner Plan includes about 2500 images for $54 a year. Flicker's Pro Plan with supposedly unlimited storage costs $50 so certainly a better deal.
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
As for me, no worries, I do not use free services, I like to check what happens to my photos ... I pay but I am free ...

Nicolas, we are of the same generation, so allow me a bit of (gentle) sarcasm.

<sarcasm>
Are you suggesting that people set up a personal web site? You must be of last century. Nowadays, people don't even know where the browser is on their smartphone and you expect them to enter a url? What will you suggest next, that people use myspace or geocities, maybe?

What are you? Some kind of anarchist that still believes in a free Internet? Sorry, but that war was lost over 10 years ago.

When one wants their family and friends to actually see their pictures, they post them on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat. Although the latter is probably only suitable for female photographers, with implants.
</sarcasm>


But, since we are from about the same era, I will explain.

About 15 years ago (July 2003), I got myself a private web site. I still have it. It has some pictures of the time and still manages my main mail address.

At the time, private web sites came with transfer fees, therefore posting a picture on the Internet came with the risk of running an uncomfortably high bill. I did not want to use my own site for that.

Later (2010), I bought a Sony A900. There was a lot of discussion about the quality of lenses at the time and I had an idea: just take pictures of the horizon, slanted to go corner to corner and post them. It is a simple procedure that anyone can do, it does not require an optical bench and is a lot less likely to give false results than photographs of a test chart (don't ask how I know). I started to post dozens of pictures of popular lenses. My hope was that other people would feel motivated and post pictures of other lenses: a collaborative effort.

At the time, flickr was the only site that allowed to post full resolution pictures for download without transfer fees. I paid for their "pro" account to get that capability.

The project was a complete failure. People used the pictures (especially on Chinese forums), but nobody felt that they could do the same project. I got a few thank you notes and several times more criticism that I should have done it a different way, that comparison was difficult, that the light was changing between pictures, etc... All what online photographers apparently want is that a tester assigns a single note to a lens to know if "IQ is good". Eventually, I took the pictures offline, but they are still on my flickr account. I'll remove them before the end of the year.

Note that I do not regret the exercise: I learned lots about lenses and I learned lots about human nature and the Internet. You should really click on that "we lost the war" link (hint, hint...).

Be insured that if flickr deletes all my pictures, I still have them. As to the pictures I posted on several forums 10 years ago, why should I care? Nobody else does.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Jerome Marot said:
Be insured that if flickr deletes all my pictures, I still have them. As to the pictures I posted on several forums 10 years ago, why should I care? Nobody else does.

Jerome, I assure you, I get many requests fo those missing pictures!

Some of the older images are part of our group memory!

We will, if we can, help maintain thread integrity by hosting images and addressing any misgiving folk, (especially that you or Nicolas Claris), might have!

Asher
 
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