Most of those who used the internet in the mid 90’s are likely to have used Flickr to store photos, before Instagram and even Google Photos came into existence. The platform, once owned by Yahoo, is about to end its offer of letting you store up to 1TB of photos for free, and bringing the limit down to a meagre 1,000 photos.
The deadline for this change has been already extended from February to 12 March and if your existing number of pictures crosses the limit of 1,000 then Flickr will delete it, from the face of the internet.
This drastic step has been taken because the company which owns Flickr, SmugMug, has been unable to justify the cost that goes behind offering millions of terabytes of storage, just to store photos, that too without charging them.
Flickr was founded in 2004 by Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield and entrepreneur Caterina Fake. The photo-sharing platform was then acquired by Yahoo in 2005, when millions of Yahoo Mail users were asked to move their photos to its newly acquired platform.
After selling Flickr to SmugMug in 2018, the penny-pinching meant that the free terabyte storage was unlikely to go on forever. This meant, people, who really valued their photos, had to upgrade (ie pay for storage) or look at alternatives like iCloud for Apple users and Google Photos for the Android user base.
Unfortunately, ‘free’ services are seldom actually free for users. Users pay with their data or with their time. We would rather the arrangement be transparent.Flickr statement from 2018
Internet experts believe the free culture was never likely to be a long-term/permanent thing and folks on Flickr and similar platforms should have seen it coming. Many would say that Flickr is one of the many products that was killed by Yahoo, pushing a platform which was once extremely popular, into oblivion.
SmugMug, the owners of Flickr are letting users archive their photos before 12 March, after which it’ll start deleting them from the platform. Having said that, you can continue to get the benefits of the old Flickr by paying $50 per year, which includes product support and increased video playback among others.
It is still cheaper than paying for Google Drive storage and if you’re a non-Android One mobile user, it wouldn’t be a bad deal to sign up with Flickr.
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