Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

[Pterodactylus]

Since a couple of years I upload my pictures I want to share on Flickr.
Free users had up to 1TB space and no significant limitations, the service was Ad financed.

The new owner (SmugMug) now announced that in the future free users will be limited to 1000 pictures total.
Which would be ok, as they can change the terms of service.

What imo is not ok is that they will delete also all old previous uploaded pictures until the limit of 1000 pics is reached.

They argue that you still can get a pro account and avoid deletion as long as you pay.

Imo these are Mafia methods, the people trusted that the pictures will be hosted a unlimited period of time and put a lot of effort into it (tagged them, sorted them into albums and generated traffic for their advertising with the content for the Hoster).

These pictures are also referenced all over the web, e.g. in many forums (like ours).
Deleting Millions of existing pictures will damage many thousands threads in forums.

Basically what their offer is, stay on our site and as long as you pay we will not delete your content (lifelong payments).

Other hosters handle this different, like if you no longer pay you will no longer be able to upload something but your content will remain intact (and still generate traffic and Ad income for the site).
Which is imo a fair agreement.

So for my personal situation.
I have way more than 1000 pictures there, mainly used at FPN and here.
I‘m ok with a change of the terms of service, but I‘m not ok blackmailing their users.
So if they would have said, ok, there is a change, you will no longer be able to upload something as free user as our terms of service changed but your existing content is save, then I would have considered upgrading to a pro account.

But in this situation I would not upgrade to a pro user even it would been the last picture hoster in the world.

As a consequence I will delete mainly older pictures used in threads on FPN (and render them unusable) and try to keep newer ones mainly used here on FPGeeks.



So, is anybody else also affected from the Flickr change?

Where do you host your pictures?



Currently I think I might will move to Instagram.
I also looked at Canon Irista, but there seem to be no real option to share the pictures in forums.

Any suggestion for a good hoster?