Seriously, if you don't want to be the product, organize those photos in a standard directory structure and synchronize it either with Dropbox or Google Drive or SkyDrive.
The downside of doing that is that storage is more expensive, but that's closer to the real price the service is worth and so that makes it sustainable. Also, migrating between cloud storage solutions is much easier.
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Actually, yes. Hard drive space is incredibly cheap, especially at their scale. My photos aren't terribly popular, so they aren't using much bandwidth either. I probably cost them $5-10/year, tops. In fact, I'm probably one of the majority, the ones who subsidize the heavy, uber-popular users with tens of thousands of followers who upload hundreds of photos a year.
Actually, no it isn't and at scale it makes it even more expensive, because you need redundancy. We are talking about RAID and CDN, not to mention that at scale hardware breaks a lot more often.
What actually makes it palatable for businesses such as Yahoo or Google is that many people pay for this storage without using it, while heavy users that share a lot help by marketing the product through their sharing to others.
On the other hand I've got 50 GB worth of data uploaded on Flickr. You can't tell me that 50 GB of redundant on-demand storage is worth $25 / year, unless you live in some kind of fairy land. I also have only a couple of photos shared. So what value does Flickr get from me?
That's related to reliability not scaling per see. Building a highly reliable system is far cheaper when you reach the scale of Google or Amazon because you can rationalize purchase. Actually, I bet price of hardware can totally be neglected next to admin and bandwidth cost.
> On the other hand I've got 50 GB worth of data uploaded on Flickr. You can't tell me that 50 GB of redundant on-demand storage is worth $25 / year, unless you live in some kind of fairy land.
I must live in fairy land. :-) You can buy 4 decent 1TB for 400$ that will allow you to cater for 20 users at 20$ per user. Conservatively you can expect them to live 3 years on average which brings the cost to 7$ per user per year. Add a 400$ server good enough to do software RAID. Let's say 5 years of life expectancy it adds 5$. It's 12$ per user plus network cost on a lan.
Flickr uses better material and pay bandwidth and admin. But they have economy of scale and can put far more than 20 50GB users on 1TB on average because a lot of them don't use them fully. I think they are above break even point at 25$/year.
It's probably past break-even point, but it's not too profitable for Yahoo. If it were, then Yahoo wouldn't let it stagnate for so long (although it could be argued that Flickr has immense potential and Yahoo failed to see it).
And that's why I said users are still the product. At scale, products have to go way beyond break even point, otherwise it's a drain of resources.
Even if that is the case, you're welcome! I'm subsidizing your account. :)
Oh, absolutely. I store a backup copy of my entire Flickr library for something like $5/year on Amazon S3, and the service hasn't exactly had insane development costs the past few years - design and feature set have stayed pretty steady.
The result is something like 50 GB of photos, which isn't so cheap to backup on Amazon S3.
But on the other hand, we are talking about photos for which we need backups, because digital storage is incredibly unreliable and I want to show those photos to my grandchildren someday.
Even the most prolific folks on my feed curate their 1,000 photo sessions into a hundred or so. I suspect you're something of an edge case.
I was just saying though ... if you need to store your photos somewhere where they are readily available, choose general-purpose cloud storage, not Flickr, not Google+ or Picasa, or whatever else "photo sharing" service exists out there.
Leave Flickr and the likes of that for a "curated" photo stream of carefully chosen photos that you want to publish to the whole world and never trust their privacy settings.
No, the downside is that there are zero social features when you put your photos on Dropbox. Flickr is better, but still not anywhere near Instagram.
That is WAY more than they need to cover expenses. Storing and serving static content is very cheap.