Back to the Flickr

Flickr is one of the first social networks I joined way back in 2007, which to me feels like just a few years ago and not 16 years ago!

The first photograph I uploaded was of Admiralty Arch having just emerged from the Strand Tube station. The photo was taken on March 30th 2007 with a Nokia N73 mobile phone.

In March 2019 when they decided to move to a (more expensive) charging model.

However I think the time has come to cull my Flickr account. I don’t think it’s worth $50 per year. The value is there, but I am not sure if that value is $50. I am a little disappointed that existing Pro subscribers are not only not grandfathered in, on their old pro rate, but that they don’t even get the introductory discount of 40% that new subscribers get.

You could still have a free account, but there was a limit of a 1000 photographs. At the time I had 14,454 photographs on Flickr.

As all the photographs I had on the service were CC licensed this meant, despite the 1000 photograph limit for free accounts the photos were retained, even though I didn’t take out a professional subscription.

There were lots of reasons why I didn’t take out a professional subscription, one of the main ones was that they (at the time) only had annual plans available.

I never deleted my account though.

Flickr was never a place which I used as a backup to my photographs, it was to me a social network. I now use Amazon Prime and more recently iCloud to store my photographs online.

In addition Instagram was becoming the “better” social network for photographs. Well people were engaging with Instagram (and it was free).

So why am I now thinking about going back to the Flickr?

It was at the ALT conference this year that I started thinking about going back. It was the 30th anniversary of conference and I was sharing on the Discord channel the different ALT-C albums I had created over the years.

However after I published the link to the ALT-C 2018 conference, I realised I didn’t have albums for 2019 or 2022. There wasn’t in-person conferences in 2020 and 2021.

I did have photographs from those conferences, but they were not in an shareable state. It was then I started thinking about going back to Flickr. It would be easier now as they now have a monthly plan as well.

So something to think about.