Flickr to Slash Free Storage From 1TB to 1,000 Photos
Flickr was, for a time, the premiere online photo sharing site for professionals and semi-professionals. Yahoo bought the site early on, slowly transforming it into a more consumer-oriented product. Now that Yahoo has been sold off in pieces, the new Flickr owner wants to take the site back to its roots. However, that means most of your photos could soon vanish as the free storage tier shrinks dramatically.
Circa 2004, Flickr launched with a limit of 200 photos for free accounts. It was mainly a portfolio site for photographers, but that was before the explosion of mobile photography. Yahoo bought the site in 2005 for around $25 million, but it slowly expanded the free offerings year after year to attract more users. The most significant change came in 2013 when it decided to offer 1TB of photo storage for free. It also updated its mobile app to automatically add photos to Flickr accounts as they were taken.
Yahoo’s long decline ended in 2017 when most of the firm was bought out by Verizon’s Oath digital content subsidiary. Flickr didn’t end up at Verizon, though. Rival photo storage site SmugMug acquired Flickr and is now calling the shots. Starting on Jan. 8, 2019, SmugMug will chop that 1TB of free storage down to just 1,000 photos or videos. If you have more and don’t want to pay for a pro subscription, Flickr will delete any content beyond that limit.
According to SmugMug, it wants Flickr to focus on professional photographers again. That does make some sense — there are already more successful image storage services focused on regular consumers like Google Photos and iCloud Photos, and those are integrated with phones. Yahoo wanted free users on Flickr to gather data and push ads, but SmugMug prefers the subscription model.
The business model might make more sense to SmugMug, but that will come as cold comfort to anyone who was using all that free storage. There is some concern that free Creative Commons-licensed images will make up a large chunk of deleted content.
Flickr says 97 percent of free users are under the 1,000 item limit. If you’re among the 3 percent, you can export your photos from Flickr and upload to something like Google Photos for free. Worst case, a pro account isn’t obscenely expensive. Monthly plans are $5.99 per month. You’ve got a few months to download your images before the change.
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