Free Flickr Changes

Free Flickr is no longer available for photo backup or for large photo archives (accumulating photos over an extended period of time). I am not certain Flickr/SmugMug would accept this second position, but it is factually accurate. Simply put as related to these two positions – Flickr wants you to pay $50 a year for a Pro account. I do because I want redundancy for my archival collection.

If you have been a Flickr member since 2007, you don’t have to be much of a photographer to have more than 1000 images. If Flickr was sincere in claiming they want to prioritize Flickr as a quality social photo site, they could have easily taken a different approach – say limiting storage to your best 200 images a year. The last thing I want is to automatically dump every image I take into Flick and it is ironic that Flickr, as well as other photo services, even makes this possible. I hate having to go into my online accounts to delete photos I have accidentally taken of a finger or my feet. I agree that these are not interesting. Flickr/SmugMug, just say that storage costs money and the company cannot afford to offer free storage for those with many photos to store.

Anyway, if you fall into the category of free user for whatever reason, you must either cull your collection or look for a different provider. Google Photos makes a great alternative and is what I rely on for redundancy as well as some other great services such as search and Google lens (automatically providing information by recognizing what appears in your photos).

MacWorld has just offered a great tutorial on how to move your photo collection from Flickr to Google Photos.

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