Flickr: Creative Commons photos don't count against free user 1000 photo limit
Flickr revealed in a new blog post on the official company blog that it made the decision to exclude Creative Commons photos from any limit imposed on users on the site.
The media company SmugMug acquired Flickr from Yahoo, part of Oath and owned by Verizon, in April 2018 for an undisclosed sum.
Yahoo neglected the once-popular photo hosting community site Flickr for a long time. While Yahoo tried different things to regain some traction, e.g. by redesigning Flickr, it was clear that Flickr was but an afterthought for the company.
The new owner of Flickr made an announcement in November 2018 that angered many free users of the service. Flickr lets anyone register an account and up until that month, offered 1 Terabyte of free storage to all free users of the service.
The announcement put an end to the free ride. Free accounts were not going away, but were limited to just 1000 photos or videos. Free Flickr users who had more than 1000 media files in their accounts were offered two options: upgrade to Pro and benefit from a first-year discount to the price of the subscription, or get excess photos deleted automatically on the day the change takes effect.
Free Flickr users who did not want to upgrade to Pro could download their images to their devices to avoid losing access to them.
A turn of events
On March 8, 2019, Flickr announced that the company made the decision to put all media released under a Creative Commons license under protection. Means: free users may store more than 1000 media files on Flickr if they release any media file after the first thousand uploads as Creative Commons.
Flickr announced back in November that it would not delete freely licensed photos to avoid disrupting "the hundreds of millions of stories across the global Internet that link to freely licensed Flickr images".
In this spirit, today we’re going further and now protecting all public, freely licensed images on Flickr, regardless of the date they were uploaded. We want to make sure we preserve these works and further the value of the licenses for our community and for anyone who might benefit from them.
The change may not help users of the service who pulled their photos and media from it after Flickr made the initial announcement, but it may help those who stayed on Flickr.
Closing Words
The initial announcement back in November was certainly not clear on how Flickr would handle media uploaded under a free license to the site. The clarification that Flickr put out this week makes it clearer.
Whether that is enough to convince free users to keep on using the site, especially if they were impacted by the changes announced in November, is unclear. Flickr does not reveal usage numbers.
Now You: What is your take on this? Good move by Flickr?
I believe it’s stupid to pay every month just to store your pictures. I don’t pay anybody the right to store my socks in a drawer.
Unless, maybe, you’re a professional photographer, and you insist on a belt, braces, parachute and NBC protective suit. Or the software on the site is so good, it allows you to file, enhance or share your pictures in a unique way.
Your analogy is flawed. If you would like to store your socks in somebody else’s drawer, you might have to pay for the privilege.
Of course my analogy is not flawed. My point is that I don’t need to store my socks in other people’s drawers. Has petty nit-picking completely replaced common sense ? Are there any thinking human beings left in the room ?
Hmm, it appears that I misunderstood your original post. I am sorry.
I also believe it is not a good idea to pay in order to store your own photos, that is why I use offline storage methods. I thought you were saying that cloud storage should be free. Sorry again.
@Clairvaux: “I believe it’s stupid to pay every month just to store your pictures.”
There are use cases where paying for third party storage makes sense. What’s stupid, in my opinion, is treating that third party storage as your sole storage place. You should always keep data you care about stored on devices that you own and control (and subject to an adequate backup regime).
A very good move by Flickr. I have no problems with Creative Commons for my photos, but they should have told us earlier!
I wonder how quickly someone can create a 3rd party add on to change them all to CC. I have 70,000 photos on Flickr, as well as on my PC. If they get deleted by Flickr, I am sad that nobody else can enjoy them.
You don’t need an add-on.
Converting all existing images of my account into a CC license:
1. Log in to your own account
2. Go to https://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/
3. In the grey box “This applies to all content that you upload in the future. You can also change the license for all your existing public content in series.” click on the blue word “Series”.
4. You come to a page where you can find the following hint: “This changes the license for all items in your photo stream.”
Now select the desired CC license and confirm with the big blue button below. Thereafter, all already published images are subject to the selected CC license.
Thorky, you got my hopes up at first. The grey box says “This will apply to everything you upload from now on. You can change the license on existing items on the photo page. To change existing content as a batch, you will need to be Flickr Pro. ”
Can you help any further, bearing in mind the 12th March deadline?
Well, yesterday evening it worked for my german account the way I described. Obviously Flickr has changed something. Right now I’m not able to login, always been thrown back to the website for my mail-adress, sorry.
@Martin:
Everyone who is considering changing their photos to be CC licensed should take the time to actually read the license they’re considering changing to and make sure they’re OK with it. It would be a shame if anyone got blindsided when someone else uses their personal photos in ways they didn’t expect.
Downloaded all our seven years of photos at flickr in massive zip files.
Moved to Amazon Photos (free with Prime). Backup stays on computer and external hard drive.
It was perplexing move by new ownership to implement payment in one hard calendar date. They are backpedaling now and may soften once more as users migrate away.