Some housekeeping: Flickr changes

You may or may not have heard that Flickr is making some changes to their account structure. While previously, free accounts could store up to 1TB of photos on Flickr, they are now reducing this dramatically to 1000 photos. For any accounts that do not upgrade to a paid membership, all but the 1000 most recent photos will be deleted.

I no longer use my Flickr account actively, but like many people a decade ago, I hosted most of my blog photos on Flickr. Ravelry also had Flickr integration which made uploading stash and project photos extremely convenient. As such, I've had to delete over 800 photos on my Flickr account.

Casey over at Ravelry has very thoughtfully already migrated the Flickr photos on Ravelry, so my Rav project photos are covered. And I've tried not to delete any photos I've specifically used in blog posts, but I'm sure I will have made some mistakes here and there. So, if you notice any broken photos on the blog, it would be great if you could leave a comment to let me know, and I can go in and fix it.

I don't begrudge Flickr their attempts to earn money from their service. If I still used Flickr regularly, I would happily fork over the money for a paid account. However, I am disappointed in their decision because it's going to have a massive ripple effect on the web as a whole, and particularly blogging communities from the mid-late 2000s and early 2010s. Personally, I knew these changes were coming to Flickr, and while it's an inconvenience for me, I still have access to my Flickr account and I still maintain this blog, so I can make adjustments. But there are loads of other sites around the web that aren't actively maintained, for any number of reasons, and if they hosted their photos on Flickr... That content will just disappear. I would have liked Flickr to offer some sort of grandfathering for old accounts that passed the 1000 photo limit. Instead, pretty soon, a big chunk of photos on the web are going to get wiped out, which I find extremely unfortunate.

Dear @DonMacAskill, the changes at Flickr make sense but I'm pretty sad about how the cutoff affects accounts from the early days of blogging, say 2004-2010, that relied on Flickr for photo hosting and contain 1000s (but not hundreds of thousands) of relatively low-res photos 😢

— casey forbes (@caseyf) November 2, 2018

~Joyuna