My Flickr Pro account expires tomorrow. I will not be renewing it. I now host all of my photos (and other stuff) here on my blog. It’s not the cost of Flickr Pro, but rather the principle. It doesn’t make sense to me, to pay a third party to host photos that I can host myself. I’ve been a Flickr user since August 2004, but it’s time to let it go.
Once the Pro account is deactivated, Flickr only makes the last 200 photos in my photostream available. The other 8,796 items will be taken offline unless I pay to keep my Pro account active. Which I won’t be doing. I’d be more than happy to leave the photos there so people could use them, but since they’re going to be taken offline by Flickr anyway, I’ll be deleting them from the service. I’m not sure why Flickr doesn’t just leave them available, since they make money by placing ads on the pages (for non-Pro members, anyway). Whatever. I could continue to pay the $25/year to keep my photos available for use under Creative Commons, but that seems rather silly.
Thanks for the (almost) 8 years and nearly 2 million views, Flickr. It’s been fun, but it’s time for me to move on.
meanwhile, back at the ranch…
Turns out, it’s not possible to just delete nearly 9,000 photos. Looks like the account has to be deleted to do it properly. So be it…
I am holding an all night vigil in Fredericksburg tonight. Also, I think I am gonna have to update a few image links on my blog now, bastard!
hahaha! worth it! take THAT, bava!
yeah. sorry about that. Flickr was going to hold my photos hostage, and would have blocked access to them anyway.
Let me know if you need any specific photos, and I can dig through my archives for you.
I’m puzzled about the “hostage” business. Why do you care if they keep offline copies of all your pictures? Does something in their user agreement prevent you from serving the same pictures yourself?
It just felt odd that they’d be continuing to host the photos, but would only make them available for people to see/use if I continued to pay an annual fee. Felt almost like paying protection. You wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to your photos would you? Pay up.
Not a big deal. They were going to be unavailable anyway, so deletion isn’t really changing anything.
One of my few claims to fame was that I think I gifted you your first Flickr Pro account (I got an extra as a gift for being an early adopter). A few years later, you returned the favour (with actual $$, I presume).
I let my Flickr Pro account lapse for a few weeks this year, and while I lost direct access to my photos, I noticed that old photos that had been embedded on other sites were still visible. I think they stayed in people’s Favorite galleries as well – I’ve lost count of how many of your pics I’ve favorited over the years…
Oh well, I do applaud the whole reclaim project, and appreciate the way you’ve been sharing your process. But just for tonight, I may join the Reverend in his vigil.
Yeah. You gave me the firm push into the wonderful world of corporate content silos. Thanks! 😉
I remember the original Pro account gift. Heady times!
So, you’re hosting all of your photos here? Wow.
I think I’m going to experiment with OpenPhoto (https://openphoto.me). It may use Dropbox (or Amazon S3) but at least I’m more in control of that.
The great thing about Flickr, for all you’ve mentioned above, is that it’s a central place to aggregate photos for an event, and it’s a wonderful example of Creative Commons licensed stuff.
Well, all of my photos that are online. I haven’t republished all bajillion photos that were on Flickr, but have started putting sets back in a gallery.
Between that and my ephemeral photostream, that reproduces pretty much all I used Flickr for.