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Comment by petepete | Hacker News Reader

This is a step in the right direction. The thing that made Flickr good was the community feeling, interactions with other photographers and groups.

The unlimited photos option made people use it like a backup/archival service. People would upload all their images without naming, tagging or organising them and the average quality of shot reduced. I'd like it to move back towards a quality over quantity mentality.

Hopefully the animated gif group invitation comments will be disabled at some point too.

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It's a bad direction for average users (not average professional photographer but average users).

Their mobile app has a sync process and touts it as a way to backup your photos. Synced photos are automatically marked as private and has NO impact on your desire of quality over quantity.

Flickr has offered free 1TB for a long time. Archival of mobile photos is the intended feature and you are shaming users for using it?

If they want to wall off average Joe from the pros, fine. It's their right. But they should not delete old photos. Storage is cheap. There's going to be lots of unhappy people when they log in a few years from now to find photos of some deceased family and realize SmugMug deleted them.

When SmugMug acquired Flickr my only comment on the article was in regards to the free 1TB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16888876) as I was afraid it works be on the chopping block. But I never imagined they would be as 'smug' as to delete old photos.

I will likely download the photos and stick them in Amazon Glacier or something. As far as the rest of the users who are not tech savvy, best of luck to them.

> Storage is cheap

It’s cheaper than it used to be, but it’s not so cheap that you can give away a free terabyte of it to millions of users. The announcement explicitly calls out that storage is a huge cost for them.

Yet they give free storage to Flickr Commons institutions ( British Library etc ) who have literally hundreds of millions of images. They have been exempted from this new policy.

This is just a shakedown against the little people using photos that they uploaded in compliance with ToS as blackmail. It's not just the damage it will do to the Internet that is the problem, it is the ethical question. Do you still trust Flickr as a custodian? What happens if you let your Pro account lapse?

Imagine if GMail announced that they were restricting accounts to 1000 emails and deleting the rest. Would anyone trust them after that?

I'm well under the new limit but will be migrating to another service, and will be paying for it.

I'm not attempting to shame users for doing it, Flickr's offer was too good to be true. Unfortunately I think that it harmed the the quality in the long run. I don't mind people using it as an archive, so long as that's not all they're using it for.

It should be a photo community, sharing and discussion platform first and foremost.

You can't ignore the fact that Flickr's traffic, especially in the age of Instagram, has taken a massive dip. I'd love to point people towards my rather humble Flickr profile instead of my Instagram one, but most people under twenty five or thirty probably don't even know what Flickr is.

I've stayed a Pro user even though there probably wasn't a lot of reason for me to do. (It's not like we're talking a lot of money.) But it's almost like Yahoo made Flickr free for most on the theory that, if you make it free, they will come. They ended up diluting Flickr for its core user base at the same time that they largely stopped enhancing the site.

I'm honestly not sure how big a market there is for a prosumer community-oriented photography site. The fact that another one hasn't really popped up is suggestive. But the ship has also sailed on competing with Facebook and Instagram on their own terms. So refocusing on their original audience probably makes sense.

I strongly suspect that there is no formula for a single service that balances the needs of:

1.) Pros/semi-pros looking to sell images

2.) Prosumers seeking to display their work and interact with a community

3.) Average people wanting to share snapshots with family, friends, and others

4.) People looking for free/cheap backup

ADDED: 5.) A free service that will maintain a massive commons of photos regardless of license "forever."

Flickr started out mostly about #2 but mutated into some of the other areas when the price barrier was removed.

> People would upload all their images without naming, tagging or organising them and the average quality of shot reduced

I have a Flickr Pro account and upload my photos set to private. If I find a good shot I set that to public or friends/family depending on the audience. I'm very aware that few people bother doing this, because -- I think -- the way most people take photos has changed. Most people now take way more photos than they used to thanks to mobile cameras, and curating all of it isn't viable. Most of my Flickr photos are private as a result -- because I've not had a chance to go through many of them.

Both Google Photos and iCloud Photos get this, and they try to solve it in slightly different ways -- but fundamentally both use an approach of "just take the photos and let us back it up and worry about surfacing the interesting photos".

I'm not sure Flickr today has the resources to do this. I still enjoy Flickr and its community and even have several hundred public photos of varying quality, but I mainly use it as a private/shared photo album. I like paying for a web-friendly service (which iCloud Photos isn't) that doesn't mess with my photos.

Oh man, animated gifs are terrible in any comment section. User reviews in Goodreads are unreadable half the time because of this.

This is an interesting tangent imo, I’ve also noticed on goodreads a correlation between the quality of the review and usage gifs/memes. Almost always, thoughtful independent reviews are devoid of them, whereas the “my reading group picked this book I couldn’t finish it” reviews are full of them. Anecdotally what I’ve noticed, ymmv etc...

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