Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x0 | Hacker News Reader

1TB isn't that impressive when you have to deal with a 300MB/month upload rate limit: http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/

It'd take 291 years to fill up the 1TB allowance: https://www.google.com/search?q=1TB+%2F+(300+MB%2Fmonth)

(Also looks like there's a missing </ul> on that limits page, there.)

Edit: Looks like the page is being edited right this moment - the page used to list the 300MB/month limit but was also mentioning the new account types, at the same time. Guess they forgot to review all the text

View on HN

As per the new plans, there is no 300MB/month upload-limits on free-accounts.( please don't see Google search results, was that cached? )

Here are their newer plans --

Free-Accounts:

+ 1 Terabyte of photo and video storage

+ Upload photos of up to 200MB per photo

+ Upload 1080p HD videos of up to 1GB each

+ Video playback of up to 3 minutes each

+ Upload and download in full original quality

Ad-Free accounts: (older pro-accounts are gone!)

+ $49.99 per year

+ All the benefits of a free account

+ No ads in your browsing experience

Doublr-Plan(extra 1 TB space):

+ $499.99 per year

+ 2 Terabytes of photo and video space

+ You get all the benefits of the free account

The google link was just for the calculator feature, noone here's been looking at cached pages.

When I looked at the limits page it was updated to list all the new plans, but it also mentioned a 300MB/month upload limit for free accounts (in two spots, I seem to recall, but at least one, and then it was gone.)

So they must be editing those pages in real-time then! All those pages and occurrences across their site. ;)

The Doublr plan is a strange offer. Wonder if there's a miscommunication on that.

I did not find it strange.

You get 1TB extra i.e total 2 TB + no ads.

Some interesting observations -- the cost of Free account for Yahoo is -- 450$ per free-user/year.

So, lets be prepared to get ads all around. :)

It makes sense, but $499 per year is expensive for an additional 1TB, when the first TB is free.

The effort of managing two accounts seems like a low barrier for the cheap

Yeah, the doublr plans are not consistent with the lower 1TB plan.

Now this is like -- 1TB online storage = 450$/year, doesn't make sense now.

1. Sign up for 2 accounts. 2. Adblock 3. ???? 4. Profit

So 1 TB is free, but an extra 1 TB is $500/yr?! I'm not sure I understand that.

On another note, I (surprisingly) like how the disemvoweling is becoming synonymous with the Yahoo brand (with Tumblr now as well). What seemed stale is starting to seem fresh again. Playful, almost, like a wink to Web 2.0 -- though I imagine it could be perceived as being out of touch too, if they don't play it right.

roughly, very roughly - 90%+ of the people on the 1 TB plan will likely use < 20 Gigabytes (at least over the next couple years), and probably 99% will use less than 100 gigabytes, whereas close to 100% of the people on the doublr plan will be using at least 1 Terabyte.

best explanation of their pricing structure yet. What's stopping people from creating multiple accounts and use flickr as a cloud backup system for free?

Agreed that this is why Yahoo is pricing it this way -- but I imagine it won't stop the pricing feeling "wrong" to many people. "Why should I pay $500 a year for just a little bit more than I what I was getting for free?"

I would imagine, at that price point, it would drive people to use multiple accounts despite the irritation -- and that ultimately, because of that irritation, they might leave the service. Not a good situation for anyone.

$42/month is pretty cheap for 2TB storage. $499/year gets you just 500GB in Dropbox, for example.

And you'd find it quite hard to leave a service after you've uploaded 1TB of data to it..

About leaving the service...

A while back I was getting nervous about what Yahoo was going to do with Flickr, so I signed up for a $60/ year SmugMug account.

On the technical side of things, transferring the data out of Flickr wasn't a problem at all. If I remember correctly, importing ~9000 (~42 Gb) of photos from Flickr took less than an hour, and preserved almost all of the meta-data I had in Flickr (sets, collections, tags, etc.). It was so fast I almost didn't believe it. Of course 1 Tb would take a while even at that speed.

The bigger problem is getting people to use the new site. My Mom, for example, still goes to my Flickr page.

I would imagine the people that need more than 1TB would be professional photographers who use flickr as a portfolio / advertising.

If you are such a heaver user that you need more than 1TB of space, you are unlikely to want to split your account into two and your would probably be unlikely to balk at spending $500 per year on what would be for you a business service.

No one has pointed out to you that it's $50 a year, not month.

$50/year is for the ad-free. They are talking about the two terabyte plan. The (understandable from the perspective of the consumer) cognitive dissonance is, 999 Megabytes is free, but 1001 Megabytes is $500/year. How can two things, so close to each other, be priced so differently?

It's a very, very small number of people (though they certainly exist) that have photo libraries of > 1 Terabyte. And, and an almost insignificant number of people who have 1 Terabyte of curated pictures. (I.E. Eliminating Dupes, Poor Composition, Focus/exposure issues, etc...)

Flickr as backup doesn't make sense - backblaze, at $50/year, makes a lot more sense. Perhaps this is Flickr's way of encouraging people to start using them as a curated upload site, and not as a backup of their entire photo library.

Nothing will stop them - but, (and I'm just guessing here) - the type of people who host more than one terabyte of photos on flickr probably don't want to screw around with multiple accounts - tracking your detailed stats, alone, gets to be a hassle with multiple accounts. Obviously some people will - but I'm guessing those will be few enough not to matter.

The bulk of the people who want to host 2 Terabytes of Photos will be fine paying $500/year, those who aren't can create multiple accounts. (Those who just want Local+Cloud backups are probably better served by just buying a 2 TB Hard Drive for $90, and backing up with backblaze for $50/year

I agree anyone seriously wanting to host that many photos will not want to split accounts, but FWIW statistics (current Pro feature) don't seem to be offered at all any more.

> tracking your detailed stats, alone, gets to be a hassle with multiple accounts

Stats are gone anyway with the new account types.

Completely agree. This is similar to shared host that offer unlimited space. For those using a lot of share/cpu, they'll get a friendly reminder to upgrade, then a notice that they can't continue supporting them as a client with their current plan.

The Flickr Pro account 24.95/yr for "unlimited storage" was an easy purchase. When you login with your Pro account you are suggested to downgrade to the new 1TB (ad) account.

For 49.99/yr I have to ask myself, do I really need this ? what are my other options.

As a current Pro user, $25 per year to continue unlimited storage, no ads (for me and for all viewing my photos) and photo statistics is still an easy sell.

However, if I were signing up for an account today, I would most likely not purchase a paid account - my main reason for paying for an account was to get past the "only your last 200 photos are visible" limitation. That said, if I actually used my flickr account for business purposes, I would not hesitate to pay $50 per year to remove ads from my photos. I suspect many professionals would agree.

Unless you're invited to sell stock through Getty, flickr isn't meant for business purposes. See http://www.flickr.com/help/website/?search=sell+photos#32257...

"probably 99% will use less than 100 gigabytes"

I suspect you meant MEGAbytes ;-)

Ah, so not many people know how much space the average user consumes.... http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communit...

In before Yahr/Yahoor.

It's just under the standard $500 authorisation limit for big corp credit cards. It also makes the $49 per year offer seem cheap.

I doubt a corp card limit has anything to do with it, this isn't a business product.

Because businesses don't need to store images?

I've built an image library for a FTSE100 company. $499 per year for storage and access to a decent API would have looked pretty cheap to be honest.

Because Flickr TOS say you can't have a business account. http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157626812125880/

I've seen nothing that says that's changed.

That is a random comment in a forum from someone who doesn't represent Flickr.

The actual TOS make no mention of whether you can have a business account or not. In face the best practices page specifically provides guidelines for businesses.

"This guide is intended to help organizations—such as businesses, groups and non-profits—get the most out of Flickr."

http://www.flickr.com/bestpractices/

http://www.flickr.com/help/website/?search=sell+photos#32257...

Businesses do not need to be in the business of selling images in order to have a need to store images.

True, It's just the first thing I think of when "photos" and "business" come up.

I just feel safer using Dropbox or Glacier. Flickr seems more like a social network, specialising in photos, and I wouldn't feel comfortable about using a service like that as a backup. As a business, the TOS are just not clear enough about what I can and can't store.

Can anyone see a way to make the 1TB serve as the main storage space of all your photos? (and not just publicly displaying them).

I'm tied into iPhoto on a very full SSD and am longing for a way out.

Something like Trovebox[0] might be a solution to your needs. You can use it as the web frontend to photos stored on dropbox/s3/box/etc

[0] https://trovebox.com/

Community manager at Trovebox here. To go along with the other Trovebox-related reply, we're planning to start work on an iPhoto plugin for Trovebox soon because we've gotten so many requests for it.

If you're specifically looking for Flickr, a little searching shows me this page, which mentions an (unofficial) iPhoto plugin: http://www.flickr.com/tools/

Uploading from iPhoto's share option, the default option is for photos to only be visible to you.

The redesign looks awesome, but who's going to pay a recurring $49 just to remove ads?

Can't help but think their money men might be about to screw this up. Hope not, love Flickr :-s

It's $49.99 a year, though. As a fairly heavy flickr user I could easily see spending $4.16/month to remove ads.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that it's not just that you don't see ads; it's also that others don't see ads on your photos. The latter can be an important feature for those who use Flickr to create professional portfolios.

The original pro account removed ads while browsing the site, Not from your pages as viewed by others. Plus a lot of the time your Photos are submitted to groups, would adds be removed every time one of your pictures turned up on the page?

Pretty sure it is not a business feature to show a clean page but a viewer option for distraction free viewing.

Anecdotally, I think it is the case that if you're a Pro user, and someone else is viewing your photostream, then they won't see ads next to your photo. This probably doesn't apply to your photos in other groups, etc. So we both may be right.

But surely they don't make $49 per user per year on ads? It looks like they're over-charging on the paid accounts to cover the costs of the free accounts. Especially the 1TB is free, 2TB is $500 deal.

And it seems that after proving people will happily pay for premium features, they've now sent an email to all their customers which essentially says unless you have over 1TB of photos with us (which is pretty-much no-one), you may as well cancel and use the free account instead.

It seems like a very bizarre structure to me and I can't see people subscribing to it which is a shame as IMHO they've just vastly improved what was already by far the best product in its market.

I Hope I'm wrong.

I would if I used it a lot.. Extensive ads ruin a lot of webpages to the extend that I just stay away..

Yes, I know I could use adblock etc., which helps, but the design and layout is still much worse than it could be. It's worth paying a small amount to fix sites I use a lot.

Also, it's the principle of the thing. If they can't see that their site is totally f#¤ useless and ugly, I'm not going to bother with them.

Maybe I'm in a minority, but I genuinely don't care about seeing the ads.

I'd never pay for them to be turned off, unless perhaps if it was a small site or community that I wanted to help out / donate to.

Oh, and the audio ads in Spotify, I'd pay in blood not to hear them :D

Even though they removed the limit from the terms today, it was still active when I tried to upload images to Flickr just now. They'll probably correct that soon, still not the most trustworthy way of making this kind of announcement.

I don't see that limit anymore. Have they updated the page? Especially with 200MB limit per photo this seems really odd.

Yes, it looks like someone's editing that page in real time now!

Yea and the 300mb limit is there now with 50mb per photo.

Nope. Gone again.

I know what you mean but this sounds like something off CSI

I'm curious to see how many people will hit that limit... the largest images I have, at about 6000 x 4000, with 48-bit floating-point pixels, using non-lossy compression, are only 80MB...

Stitch a few of those into a panorama.

I'm a little shocked honestly - they might as well offer "unlimited" storage if I can only upload 3.6GB per year in images.

This makes the entire 1 TB craze seem like a giant farce.

Edit: It appears they have removed the limit, disregard.

I think it's intended to distract you from the actual limit. If they came out and said "Unlimited storage" everyone's first reaction would be "What's the catch?"

Huh. Flickr Pro is gone, and there's no way to lift this 300MB/mo limit? Looks like Dropbox might have found themselves a new paying customer.

When I log in, I see:

"Dear [name], as a Pro member continue to enjoy the benefits of unlimited space, an ad free experience and stats."

"Smile [username]. Flickr gives you one free terabyte of space. Share your photos in full resolution. See what's new Pro members, your subscription remains the same."

It seems Pro is still here.

The pro badge is no more, and pro accounts exist only as grandfathered in plans. You can renew an existing pro account, but those who aren't currently can't subscribe to it.

OK, maybe I'm shallow and elitist, but at least I'm honest. I always liked seeing my little "pro" badge there...

It's worth pointing out that you can't renew existing pro accounts manually, only accounts that are set up with recurring transactions will renew automatically. For some reason this doesn't include my account, as far as I can tell. I'm a little annoyed about this.

As I understand it, accounts that were originally a gift, like mine, don't get the recurring transaction treatment. This makes sense, but only up to a point, that point being where the owner of the account renews it with a different credit card and it becomes truly "theirs".

I am not sure that flickr gave this scenario due consideration, there must be a lot of people who received pro as a gift but have since paid to renew it will be unable to benefit from the reduced "grandfathered" price of $25.

This only applies to existing Pro accounts, not new ones [1].

[1] https://secure.flickr.com/help/limits/#150487675

Although, for existing Pro users, it looks like they can continue renewing their Pro accounts [1]:

* Starting on 5/20/2013, we will no longer be offering new Flickr Pro subscriptions. After that point, the following things will happen: *

* Recurring Pro users currently have the ability to renew. *

[1] https://secure.flickr.com/help/limits/#150487675

I saw that - but I haven't been able to find out what price we can renew at. If it's still at $25 - every pro user in the universe will renew. If it's even $50 - for unlimited storage (versus $500/year for 2 terabytes) - still sounds like a no brainer.

I wonder if Yahoo/Flickr are really going to take that good a care of their existing pro users?

I believe, as of now, the price is still $25. From my own "manage your pro account page":

Your Flickr Pro subscription:

1-year Pro at $24.95 Your Pro account will renew automatically on 3rd September, 2013

https://secure.flickr.com/account/order/manage

Interesting. Yes, I'm seeing similarly - $44.95 on a two year basis, renewing next in September.

Pro is now "Ad Free": http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/

Well, sort of. There's no mention of bandwidth on the new limits page, other than it was previously unlimited under Pro. They apparently haven't completely updated their FAQ page...

I'm unable to find any mention of this 300MB/month limit on that linked page?

I only see: "Upload photos of up to 200MB per photo"

Check again, the mention of 300MB/month is gone. Looks like old copy cache.

Humour me, but are you on the Flickr team? I'm seeing that page change before my very eyes, clearly as a "oh shit!" response when the discrepancies were noticed, and the cache excuse is as old as time.

Probably just didn't get all the edits in from the old FAQs. No reason for the accusations.

It was developer humour rather than an accusation. Many of us have been in the situation where we overlooked changing something, and when it's noticed we quickly change it and attribute the original mistake to some mysterious caching issue.

Just tried to use their uploader and hit the limit when I got to 300MB.

Flickr staff commented on this post that the 300Mb monthly limit was a bug:

http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633531669359/pag...

Never knew Google Calculator could be used like that. Thanks.

Beware, it has a subtle catch:

    (1 TB) / (300 (MB / month)) = 291.271111 years

But if you think you're dealing with decimal Bytes, you're wrong - e.g, putting it in GB and taking the units out:

    1000 / (0.3 / month) = 277.777778 years

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte - Google is using TiB/GiB/MiB and writing up the wrong unit)

I think you mean the right unit :)

I don't actually see the 300MB/month limit on that page. Was it possibly a vestigial FAQ list item that just got removed?

The page specifically listed the new account types (free, adfree, doublr) but also mentioned that the free account was limited to 300mb/month. Maybe they forgot to change a paragraph when they published it earlier.

For most normal users taking a normal amount of photos, that's absolutely fine.

Where is the upload rate limit mentioned?

It is not. Some id^H^H guy saw the old limit posted before the page was updated, and tons followed to comment without pausing to think that such a limit does not make sense with the new announcement.

The page was using all the new account type names, and seemed like it was otherwise all up to date. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered posting about it. Seemed like a plausible "catch" to the generous storage limit.

As a Flickr Pro user, this upsets me. 300MB is like what, 20-odd full-sized JPEGs? A month? With no way to lift that limit even if paying?

Ugh.

I wish people wouldn't downvote others for simply reporting on what they see. It's not your fault Fickr is live editing their page.

And Internet forum votes aren't personal. Karma doesn't matter. We downvote bad information, period.

On Reddit, sure. HN, like StackOverflow, uses it to decide what level of participation you're allowed to have.

Only essentially at levels that are extraordinarily achievable with participation. Really, only at the 500 level does it matter.

Wait, what? I don't post a lot on HN, what do you get at the 500 point level..?

The ability to downvote.

That Flickr page is a bizarre mishmash of old and new information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com