Flickr fail?

Time for another tech post: fresh from the saga of Photobucket's disastrous changes of last year, I once again find myself discussing an unpopular change to an online photo hosting service but this time it does affect me personally. Back in the mists of time I had an account at Fotopic.net but since that company went out of business, Flickr has been my (and many other photographers') site of choice.

After a tough recent past that has seen a lot of ups and downs as part of the Yahoo empire, Flickr has now found itself in the ownership of fellow photography site SmugMug, which it was hoped would create a new era of focus and stability. However, in recent weeks a controversial and potentially damaging change to Flickr policies was announced, sparking a vocal backlash in the wake of Photobucket's similar actions. Read on to see the message in full and why I think this change isn't all bad news...

Reproduced verbatim below is the message posted to the Flickr Blog on the first of this month:

Beginning January 8, 2019, Free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos and videos. If you need unlimited storage, you’ll need to upgrade to Flickr Pro.
In 2013, Yahoo lost sight of what makes Flickr truly special and responded to a changing landscape in online photo sharing by giving every Flickr user a staggering terabyte of free storage. This, and numerous related changes to the Flickr product during that time, had strongly negative consequences.

First, and most crucially, the free terabyte largely attracted members who were drawn by the free storage, not by engagement with other lovers of photography. This caused a significant tonal shift in our platform, away from the community interaction and exploration of shared interests that makes Flickr the best shared home for photographers in the world. We know those of you who value a vibrant community didn’t like this shift, and with this change we’re re-committing Flickr to focus on fostering this interaction.

Second, you can tell a lot about a product by how it makes money. Giving away vast amounts of storage creates data that can be sold to advertisers, with the inevitable result being that advertisers’ interests are prioritized over yours. Reducing the free storage offering ensures that we run Flickr on subscriptions, which guarantees that our focus is always on how to make your experience better. SmugMug, the photography company that recently acquired Flickr from Yahoo, has long had a saying that resonates deeply with the Flickr team and the way we believe we can best serve your needs: “You are not our product. You are our priority.” We want to build features and experiences that delight you, not our advertisers; ensuring that our members are also our customers makes this possible.

Third, making storage free had the unfortunate effect of signaling to an entire generation of Flickr members that storage—and even Flickr itself—isn’t worth paying for. Nothing could be further from the truth: there is no place like Flickr to share, to discover, to learn, and to interact around photography. And because storing tens of billions of Flickr members’ photos is staggeringly expensive, we need our most-active members to help us continue investing in Flickr’s stability, growth, and innovation.

That seems logical and actually makes a lot of sense, and their honesty in admitting the mistakes of the past is admirable. The new policy isn't without its problems though and has already caused a backlash among free users who don't feel it is fair that they'll have to start paying $50 a year just to keep their existing photos available online.

The most controversial part, not stated above but in a follow-up post, is the announcement that users with more than a thousand photos who don't upgrade by early February will have their older photos deleted to leave only the most recent 1000. Just like the situation infamously created by Photobucket, that will cause a lot of destruction as images linked from Flickr to blogs, forums and other sites will disappear. At least this time there is a few months of notice to allow users to decide what to do but it's still a very undesirable situation that will result in the permanent loss of information that can't be updated, for instance because the account holder has died or the forum software no longer allows editing of old posts.

Photobucket made a complete mess of informing their users, the first sign of trouble being when their photos were replaced by the image telling them to upgrade their account. Flickr have been a little better at providing advance notification but it still leaves a lot to be desired. There have been no emails or private messages and the information quoted above is only on the Flickr Blog and not the user's home page. I have the URL of my own photostream saved in my favourites and have never visited the Flickr Blog before so I only found out when a friend shared the message to a Facebook group and can't be the only one not to have known what is coming. So now we know what's happening to Flickr next year, what do I think of these imminent changes?

Empty promises and too much for nothing?

Users may be up in arms, but these new changes frankly aren't the real problem and are a sensible reaction to a mistake of the past. In hindsight, that decision made in 2013 to offer all users a terabyte of free space was a fatal one that gave far too much away for nothing and made the paid account worthless, which must have cost Flickr dearly.

A free Flickr account offered far more than any of its competitors, paying for a Pro subscription didn't give any more storage (1TB was more than enough anyway) and benefits were limited, mainly no adverts and access to more stats so it just wasn't worth spending any money when so much was available free of charge. Describing the paying users as 'Pro' has always been misleading anyway as that implies they are professional photographers when in reality it has nothing to do with the quality of their work and simply means they've paid for additional features and services.

I've noticed a definite change in Flickr content since 2013: quantity may have increased but quality and interaction has dropped significantly. Back when I signed up in 2010, a majority of users would put some effort into selecting good images, enhancing them and writing captions to display them at their best and encourage engagement. Nowadays though, a lot of people seem to use Flickr purely as a storage site and their photostreams are just a sea of random raw images straight from the camera with no captions and no context that are no pleasure to look at. That's not what sites like Flickr were intended for and there are plenty of cloud storage services like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive that are far more suitable for people who just want to store rather than share their photos.

It's obvious that Flickr never had anywhere near enough resources to actually deliver the terabyte to every single one of their users so this was always an empty promise. It isn't clear how many users Flickr has altogether, but they've claimed 120 million in the past. If they all took full advantage and used their whole allowance, Flickr would require 120 million terabytes or 120 exabytes of storage. That's a factor of ten beyond what even the very largest internet giants have at their disposal - Google for instance are estimated to have a total of about 10 exabytes across all their services. The decision to delete free users' excess photos lends a clear lie to this too: if Flickr were prepared to give everyone an entire terabyte, most of which has never been used, they don't now need to start deleting photos to reclaim server space and can quite happily leave them all there. 

For more evidence that the 1TB giveaway wasn't properly thought out, look at something silly that happened when it was first introduced. Flickr rolled out this new massive storage allowance but at the same time left the 500MB daily upload limit in place. Someone quickly calculated that it would take about 300 years to fill a terabyte at that rate and a rather embarrassed Flickr sheepishly had to remove the limit. Why hadn't anyone at Yahoo done that simple sum and realised the new policy was impossible to take advantage of before going live with it, or was it just a pie-in-the-sky huge number chosen without much thought to attract customers by offering far more than they would or could ever hope to use?

I suppose there is one crucial question that will determine Flickr's future but has become difficult to answer: what exactly is Flickr supposed to be? Is it a place for amateur and professional photographers to display their work, an equivalent to Instagram for sharing phone snaps, or a cloud storage solution? Originally it was the first option but Yahoo tried to turn it into the second and it ended up becoming primarily the third one with elements of the others that didn't really do anything well and had a confused identity as it can't be all three at the same time. Its reputation also wasn't helped by numerous poorly-received, half-hearted and half-finished redesigns that broke features and created an inconsistent and sometimes clunky user experience.

The future of Flickr

So what will happen to Flickr now? While the new policies aren't as obviously disastrous as those of Photobucket, the consequences have already started showing themselves as users have begun deleting their photos and cancelling their subscriptions. Really though it is Yahoo's actions of 2013 that are to blame for the latest changes, by giving far too much away free of charge and spoiling users with an offering that was never going to be sustainable. It was only a matter of time before that excessive generosity came back to haunt the new owners, but the age-old problem is that people don't like being given things and then having them taken away, so they're getting angry at these restrictions rather than questioning if what they used to get was actually reasonable.

I'm quietly confident that Flickr will survive but in a slimmed-down and more focused form that appeals to 'proper' photographers willing to pay a reasonable sum to showcase their work rather than casual snappers. Maybe a cull is needed and these changes will hopefully drive away those users who exploited the free account to misuse it as a storage solution and bring it back closer to its original intent of a photo sharing site. I think $50 a year is a fairly affordable and not unreasonable sum for what is on offer, quite unlike the $400 a year charged by Photobucket for an inferior level of service that is frankly just extortion.

However...I can't help thinking Flickr haven't learned enough from the Photobucket saga, and if they could just reconsider the decision to delete free users' older photos people would be a lot happier. That fiasco, which itself must have benefitted Flickr by attracting disgruntled Photobucket users, left a very bad taste that is still fresh in many people's minds, so it's imperative that Flickr avoid repeating the same mistakes. They seem to have plenty of storage, so why can't they leave the older photos visible on linked sites but hide them from the Flickr interface? That's what used to happen with free accounts before 2013: only the last 200 photos were displayed on Flickr itself but the older ones were still there and visible where they had been linked, and there were few complaints about that policy.

Personally I've invested far too much time and effort into my Flickr site over the last eight years or so to give up on it now and start again elsewhere. I feel $50 a year is a reasonable price to pay so I'll carry on using it, but I expect engagement with my photos to drop significantly as user numbers decline. What's your view on these latest developments though? Do you use Flickr? What do you think of their current product, do you believe things need to change and have they gone about it in the right way?