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Comment by blueadept111 | Hacker News Reader

This is the death knell for Flickr. I've relied heavily on Flickr advanced search to find nature photos of particular plant and animal species. This new policy will undoubtedly results in many photos being deleted, and therefore limiting the search results. Their large archive of photos is/was a real asset, albeit one they haven't been smart enough to monetize effectively. Deleting these photos is just another small step in the slow disintegration of the site, sadly.

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I wish they would at least leave creative commons licensed pictures, so many will likely disappear - it's such a shame.

My thoughts exactly, those are the images I typically search. Wikimedia commons does seem to have a bot (and/or some kind of manual process) that collects some of the creative commons photos from Flickr, but not all of them, even if they are good photos that are well-tagged. I usually search both sites, so I have a good sense of how often a photo appears one on site and not the other. Incidentally, it would sure be nice if Wikimedia commons allowed you to filter by license type.

I do hope some bot out there is collecting and archiving Flickr's creative commons photos before they disappear for good.

> nature photos of particular plant and animal species

It's not a like-for-like replacement, but GBIF (my employer) indexes a fairly large collection now. You need a scientific (Latin) name for an effective search.

HN's favourite genera are presumably these three: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/gallery?media_type=StillImag...

NB the "license" filter applies to the text parts of the record, many images have a different license.

I don't see why it's a death knell - as the linked article says, 97% of free users have less than 1000 pictures, and so won't see any difference. Your specific use-case would only be affected if the users you rely on happen to be mostly that 3%.

The question is what percentage of images, and quality ones, are those 3%.

Of course Flickr are going to find metrics that make this move sound low impact. But are these total accounts made up of mainly dead useless signups from over the years? If the 3% of users are of small significance, then I suspect Flicker wouldn't bother with this update.

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