If you’ve been using a free Flickr account as a 1-terabyte backup cloud, there’s been some unfortunate news. Flickr will be removing the unreal amount of free storage space, and opt for a much different option.
Announced on November 1st, free users will only be granted 1,000 free photos under 200 megabytes each. The changes come shortly after Yahoo sold Flickr to self-funded SmugMug. The 1-terabyte of free space was implemented by Yahoo in 2013 and gave users another option to move up to 2TB.
“On November 1, 2018, we announced how we’d begin bringing Flickr back to its roots: an active, photo-sharing community,” writes SmugMug CEO Dan MacAskill. “This meant upgrading our Pro accounts and changing Free accounts to encourage photographers to use Flickr again for interaction and inspiration and not just for backup storage.”
Going forward, users have the option of paying $50 a year for a Pro membership and will be granted unlimited storage space, among other things. For those holding onto a free account, they have until February 5th, 2019, to trim their library down to 1,000 photos before Flickr begins removing images themselves.
But, in the spirit of collaboration, Flickr has a different policy for photographs falling under Creative Commons licensing. CC images will NOT be deleted if the user still has more than 1,000 images by February 5th, but the account will be unable to upload any additional photos over the given capacity, encouraging those users to spring for a Pro account. It should be noted that many users who provide CC images are large businesses or professionals who already have the upgraded account.
Be sure to notify your friends and family who use the free version of Flickr before a terabyte of their memories disappear three months from now.
Feature image via Shutterstock
