So Long, Flickr, and Thanks for All the Photos
A sad note to everyone who’s followed my photos on Flickr, especially to friends and family who have counted on that feed for visual updates of my son’s growth and adventures from the day he was born: my account will soon go dark.
In the past 14 years, I’ve uploaded 7,230 photos to the platform (most with restrictions on who sees them, so the number you see might be significantly lower), first paying for a Pro account for many years but relying on the free version since 2013, when the storage limit was raised to 1TB. In that time, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the quality of the site, service, mobile app, and features under Yahoo’s ownership, while free alternatives have become better and more numerous. I’ve really remained this long only out of intertia and the following of friends and family who have come to rely on that means of engaging with my photos. SmugMug’s acquisition earlier this year stayed the execution a bit longer, as I had high hopes they might turn it around and make it worth staying, but today’s news finally brought down the axe.
With their new plan to limit free accounts to 1,000 photos, and not enough value to warrant a Pro account at 50 bucks a year, more than 6,000 of my photos will be deleted in the new year, and the ones that remain will be temporary, pending new photos that push the older ones beyond the limit and into the abyss. I’m in the process of downloading my entire archive and figuring out what to do next, but for now, you’ll see me on Instagram, Google Photos, iCloud, Facebook, Twitter, or wherever else I end up sharing photos.
It’s a shame, because Flickr started out so great, but it’s time to settle on a better option out of the many alternatives that have now swarmed to fill the market Flickr originally pioneered. I’ll let you know where to find me when I land, though I might not ever have that single spot for all of my photos that Flickr has been for me since the summer of 2004.
Brian Sawyer 
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