Flickr limiting photos for free accounts, what about all the wonderful old photos?

[BMbikerider]

I wish they would eliminate mine. I have no access to my account. I can't even get in to delete my images. I have tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried to get logged in but I am not allowed. A couple of years ago out of the blue my email carrier went out of business and I lost my access email. I have tried and tried and tried and tried and tried to contact someone but there is no one home. There is no technical backup. I wonder how many accounts are like mine. Not accessible to anyone. Just sitting there using space. I still get notices now and then of some new person following me. I need a good idea to make a new account and contact all the followers I have.
Dennis

Have you tried this URL https://help.flickr.com I found it with little effort with a quick search on the web. You will need to have your URL, the E Mail you are registered with and, account name for the form to complete to delete the account. There is a panel to explain why you need to do this. They may be able to help you keep it with another active E Mail address - It would be worth a try.

 

[ic-racer]

I guess this whole dilemma emphasizes the worthlessness of most digital imagery. Who in their right mind would give money for safe-keeping to an internet hosting service, rather than a bank. And then expect that value (money) to be safe.

 

[removedacct1]

I have been an enthusiastic Flickr member for 13 years, and in that time I built up a body of work amounting to nearly 1800 images. When Flickr announced the “1000 photos or you pay” policy, I was very disgruntled that the cutoff was 1000 images, or “unlimited if you pay”. There was no third option like “2500 images for $20 per year” which I would gladly have subscribed to. I find the change to be very much an all-or-nothing model, and it really irked me to be forced to make that choice.

And so, I chose to delete half of my thirteen year archive of images rather than submit to the extortion. It’s not a matter of “is Flickr worth 50 bucks a year?”, but a response to what I feel is a very harsh policy turnaround that seems very poorly thought out. I’m sad to have had to delete 800+ photos - mostly images from my early portfolio - but my anger with the heavy-handed policy change led me to that decision. If Flickr became a “pay-or-get-out” service, then I would definitely pack up and go. I feel I’ve been punished for “taking advantage” of the service for 13 years, and that doesn’t sit well with me. It’s not like I dumped 500,000 iPhone snapshots on their servers, like some members did.

 

[markjwyatt]

Fortunately for me I had not achieved 1000 photos at the announcement (and am still shy a few, but will be there soon), so I was able to make a decision without feeling under the gun. I chose to subscribe. I have noticed a decline in server performance recently, which is a little worrying.

 

[dpurdy]

Have you tried this URL https://help.flickr.com I found it with little effort with a quick search on the web. You will need to have your URL, the E Mail you are registered with and, account name for the form to complete to delete the account. There is a panel to explain why you need to do this. They may be able to help you keep it with another active E Mail address - It would be worth a try.

The trouble I had was due to my trying too many times to log in and getting flagged and needing to verify that I am me and my verification email being disfunct. Anyway I finally just made a new email and new account and will try to find ways to communicate with people following me. thanks.

 

[Wallendo]

I visit Photrio frequently and make an annual donation.
I visit a college football site frequently and make an annual donation.
I visit a movie/home theatre site which is free but makes it's money selling products via an Amazon referral program.
Obviously, every site has to have some form of revenue.
99% of Flickr photos are useless (and probably 99% of my photos are as well). Loss of millions of abandoned images is not a great loss. I do find the service useful and am a "pro" subscriber. It is the easiest way for me to make family photos available to family and friends (it is not my primary back-up mechanism).

 

[macfred]

There are still accounts that are not deleted.

They don't delete the accounts - they delete the photographs from oldest to newest date uploaded—to meet the new limit (1000 photographs).
Those members over the limit will no longer be able to upload new photos to Flickr - a subtle difference!

 

[c41]

For now at least, if you have a 'free' account with >1000 images, you are prevented from viewing any of your own images until you choose 'Save your Photos' or 'Mark for deletion'.

Flickr's 'value equation' has dipped considerably for me. As storage becomes ever cheaper and the cloud becomes more pervasive it's rocketed up in cost and reduced in functionality.

 

[awty]

Wish the bad panda would eat the kid, would pay for a subscription, just to never see it again.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

I visit Photrio frequently and make an annual donation.
I visit a college football site frequently and make an annual donation.
I visit a movie/home theatre site which is free but makes it's money selling products via an Amazon referral program.
Obviously, every site has to have some form of revenue.
99% of Flickr photos are useless (and probably 99% of my photos are as well). Loss of millions of abandoned images is not a great loss. I do find the service useful and am a "pro" subscriber. It is the easiest way for me to make family photos available to family and friends (it is not my primary back-up mechanism).

Photos provided by NASA and other Commons are 99% useless?
Photos from countries you will never see are useless?
High resolution photos by every possible photo gear made are useless?

 

[Wallendo]

Photos provided by NASA and other Commons are 99% useless?
Photos from countries you will never see are useless?
High resolution photos by every possible photo gear made are useless?

NASA photos make up way less than 1% of Flickr images. Most of Flickr images consist of people taking photos of their girlfriends, or the same old tourist sites - different cameras or lenses, but the same old photos. I know people on Photrio only create masterpiece images with every single shutter click, but my experience is that I am lucky to get 2 or 3 "keepers" from a 36 exposure roll of film, and even fewer images of any lasting value. With people posting thousands of images on Flickr, how many of these personal accounts have thousands of "keepers". Flickr, like many hosting/backup services, allow people to semi-permanently archive images which a traditional photographer would never have printed.

When I look at my Aperture library of 25,000 images (there are frequent duplications), I realize that only a handful will have any lasting meaning to my descendants and other relatives. I am looking at ways of saving all my images for my personal use, but also a way to more permanently archive that small subset of images that may be of interest to others now or in the future.

I suspect that more images, mostly digital, have been lost or abandoned in the last year, than photos ever taken in the first 150 years of photography. And I suspect most of these lost images aren't missed. When it is easy to takes dozens of snapshots daily, if not more, it is easy to assume that only a few will be meaningful.

I empathize with users having to wean down their accounts to only 1000 images, especially since this is done with short notice, but with the exception of archivists, most collections would actually look much better weaned down a little.

 

[faberryman]

When I look at my Aperture library of 25,000 images (there are frequent duplications), I realize that only a handful will have any lasting meaning to my descendants and other relatives. I am looking at ways of saving all my images for my personal use, but also a way to more permanently archive that small subset of images that may be of interest to others now or in the future.

I have been a photographer for 45 years and can put my keepers as tifs on an SD card. Photographers with mult-terabyte RAID arrays are deluding themselves. If you don't edit your own photos, no one else is going to do it when you are gone.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

NASA photos make up way less than 1% of Flickr images. Most of Flickr images consist of people taking photos of their girlfriends, or the same old tourist sites - different cameras or lenses, but the same old photos. I know people on Photrio only create masterpiece images with every single shutter click, but my experience is that I am lucky to get 2 or 3 "keepers" from a 36 exposure roll of film, and even fewer images of any lasting value. With people posting thousands of images on Flickr, how many of these personal accounts have thousands of "keepers". Flickr, like many hosting/backup services, allow people to semi-permanently archive images which a traditional photographer would never have printed.

When I look at my Aperture library of 25,000 images (there are frequent duplications), I realize that only a handful will have any lasting meaning to my descendants and other relatives. I am looking at ways of saving all my images for my personal use, but also a way to more permanently archive that small subset of images that may be of interest to others now or in the future.

I suspect that more images, mostly digital, have been lost or abandoned in the last year, than photos ever taken in the first 150 years of photography. And I suspect most of these lost images aren't missed. When it is easy to takes dozens of snapshots daily, if not more, it is easy to assume that only a few will be meaningful.

I empathize with users having to wean down their accounts to only 1000 images, especially since this is done with short notice, but with the exception of archivists, most collections would actually look much better weaned down a little.

Flickr always gave choice. How many pictures are visible on the stream page and how many are only visible via external share. It was always up to the user.
If you want to show ten images and share twenty five thousands it is the availible choice.
My flickr shows one thousand, but more images are shared via links.
So, it is not Flickr, but its users choice .

 

[blockend]

Permanence begins and ends with the creator. If you care about your pics you will keep negatives (if you shoot film), prints, and scanned images in the cloud AND off line. It is a drag.

I went through a tortuous metastable period of dying computers, dying raid drives, Apple abandonment of Aperture, to preserve digital images that I wanted to preserve. Preservation even including me buying a Canon pro-10 printer to make 5x7 prints of pics (mainly of kids, family, places we've been) I really want my kids to have when I long gone.

Relying only on cloud storage alone will end badly for many.

Regrettably, you're absolutely right. Over the years I must have had 4 different Flickr accounts. The first one died with a computer, and despite numerous attempts to retrieve the photos, they are marooned in cyberspace. There was, probably still is a message that puts you into a retrieval loop, which became eternal when they withdrew the email key to unlock it. The others succumbed to similar changes of ownership, orphaned mail hosts, laptop failures, whatever. I gave up on the internet as a means of display.

The problem with photo hosting sites and Flickr in particular, is operating models vary wildly depending when you join. 500 pictures to a whole TB and stages in between, value in Pro membership, little value in Pro. Benign ownership, leveraged models. Last time I looked I had access to other people's stuff via an empty site, but it's an unrewarding pursuit. Basically, hosts can charge whatever they feel the market can tolerate once they have traction. There's no upper limit to what people might be prepared to pay for a few thousand shots somewhere down the line.

If hosting is part of personal business exposure, who cares about the cost? However slick landscapes and flawless portraits aren't what I look for when I'm browsing. It's the quirky stuff most people ignored, the individual, unrepeatable and homespun that will be lost, not the cash cow derivative photos.