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

  1. #41
    Senior Member Jon Szanto's Avatar
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    The bottom line is this: have they violated the Terms of Agreement that you signed and/or agreed to when you signed up for their service, or have they not? If they have violated that agreement, then you have a case to complain; if they have not, you are whistling in the wind.

    I expect *nothing* from the people/companies who promise *everything*. It is what is agreed to that is of paramount importance.
    "When Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick;
    and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."

    ~ Benjamin Franklin

  2. #42
    Senior Member Pterodactylus's Avatar
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    It’s not about the expectation getting everything for free, and it’s not about terms of service.

    Social media is based on the the idea that the data has no expiration date, i think this is part of the success.
    Many of these are of course without direct monetary compensation for the user, what is advertised as “free”.

    But free does not really mean free in the traditional understanding.
    It’s not anymore as simple as: I give you money you give me a service.
    We live in the data centric age, data is more valuable than anything else.

    Free in the meaning of social media really means, I give you digital data, you provide the service.
    It’s all about the value of the data.

    This is what all the big social media players like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and co. follow.

    Flickr is a social media and people joined there because they traded data for service, additionally they accepted Ads to keep the lights on.
    The provided data beside everything else also meant to be more attractive to users, generating more traffic, more paying users, more Ad volume.
    And for sure the expectation was that the data will last longer than you pay for additional premium features.

    Now they changed this and imho the people for sure have reason to be pissed, no matter if they had the right to do it or not (and they have the legal right to do it for sure).

    But this does not mean that doing this changes will not damage their business model significantly.
    There treasure is the immense amount of data (pictures) and the vivid active community.
    Imo they damaged both significantly with the recent decisions.

    People expects that social media data lasts forever (whatever this means) or at least a lifetime or more, this is part of the idea.

    Beside that such data might also have or will have historic or common social value.

    Itˋs not anymore about the simple approach: provide something - pay for it like in ancient times.

    Welcome to the 21 Century
    Last edited by Pterodactylus; November 8th, 2018 at 12:21 AM.

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  4. #43
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    After reading comments here and there regarding FLICKR changes, plus the new log-in system to new FLICKR, I will probably close my account.
    The most important change for me is how they decide to approach this. Deleting old photos until reach 1000 is pure stupid, and that will affect huge amount of post on different forums everywhere.

  5. #44
    Senior Member Jon Szanto's Avatar
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    Quote Originally Posted by Pterodactylus View Post
    it’s not about terms of service.
    It most certainly is. If you can point to a violation of what YOU agreed to when you signed on to their service, I'll be more than happy to listen and commiserate.

    Flickr is a social media...
    That is completely erroneous. At it's basic, core function, it is an onlilne storage place for your images. All other aspects flow from that, from sharing them to creating groups, etc. What costs them money, what is the main drain on their side of the equation is the stored data and the hardware necessary for that, as well as the bandwidth to service all the various calls to your data.

    Really, not understanding that is a bit odd. Facebook was designed as a social media site that additionally allows one to store data; Flicker is a data storage platform that added other sharing services after that. I'm willing to be that is all clearly stated in the Terms of Agreement.

    Flickr Terms of Service (current version)

    Note the following:

    "PLEASE READ THESE TERMS OF USE CAREFULLY. BY ACCESSING OR USING THE SERVICES, PURCHASING PRODUCTS OR FLICKR PRO SERVICES, OR CLICKING THAT YOU AGREE, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THESE TERMS OF USE."
    Last edited by Jon Szanto; November 8th, 2018 at 12:26 AM.
    "When Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick;
    and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."

    ~ Benjamin Franklin

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  7. #45
    Senior Member Pterodactylus's Avatar
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    Quote Originally Posted by Jon Szanto View Post

    It most certainly is. If you can point to a violation of what YOU agreed to when you signed on to their service, I'll be more than happy to listen and commiserate.

    Flickr is a social media...
    That is completely erroneous. At it's basic, core function, it is an onlilne storage place for your images. All other aspects flow from that, from sharing them to creating groups, etc. What costs them money, what is the main drain on their side of the equation is the stored data and the hardware necessary for that, as well as the bandwidth to service all the various calls to your data.

    Really, not understanding that is a bit odd. Facebook was designed as a social media site that additionally allows one to store data; Flicker is a data storage platform that added other sharing services after that. I'm willing to be that is all clearly stated in the Terms of Agreement.
    Ok, fair enough, let’s agree to disagree.

    Time will show if Flickr can survive as pure storage hoster selling storage for a small amount of time (annual Pro membership time slices beside the big players which can afford to give you huge amount of storage for free (like e.g. Google))

    Storage, bandwidth and processing capacity is getting massively cheaper every year, this is not a sustainable business model, and this will continue.
    E.g. what was a valuable amount of storage and bandwidth five years ago is now water under the bridge.
    Companies which trust on this as business model will imo not last very long.

    E.g. I also work for an big IT company which e.g. also works on the internet of things. Idea is that everything can get, store, process data and is connected.
    Bandwidth and data storage capacity are treated as given things, companies which stick to such an approach will be history sooner than later.

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

    What I value on Flickr is the fact that it's a photography forum. It has a number of interesting groups dedicated to particular subjects, such as Buddhist temples, Orthodox church architecture, carnivals, particular places. It has a lot of serious photographers as members. It's not, generally, full of pictures of what people ate last night, the bar they're in this evening, lolcatz or political memes, or if it is, I'm not seeing them.

    I think they've mishandled this situation by not communicating first with account holders. However what I see from direct contact is that free account holders (I'm a Pro account holder) will get given time to decide what to do - pay up, rationalise their images or move them elsewhere. That's very different from what Photobucket did, pulling the plug overnight on links and displaying their blackmail messages. (The $49 annual fee is also a lot less than the $300 Photobucket demanded from me.)

    I'll stick with Flickr. It does deliver me some good things including being able to offer specific licences and being able to put photos up in high resolution. But if you're mainly interested in hosting for photos for this forum, then something like Imgur might be cheaper and easier.

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  10. #47
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    Lets get some basic facts down.

    When Flickr started the free option was very limited, there were extreme restrictions on how much data you could upload and even back then when sensors were still mainly 4Mb and less and phones only took small images, you were still looking at a hundred photos or so if you were lucky.

    Flickr were bought out by Yahoo and over time the free service improved, to such an extent that for most people there was no point in the Pro subscription unless there were specific features you wanted to use. During this time Yahoo were losing money (and still are) with no end in sight. Over time they have sold off components outside of their core business that have been losing them money, including Flickr.

    Pictures require space. Forget about the cost of a hard drive for your PC, when you get on to commercial storage, with resilience, cross data centre protection, backups, etc, you start looking at $3-400 per TB. Also forget about economies of scale, more disks means more intelligent cabinets and more networking. Also forget about cloud reducing costs. From commercial experience I have seen just how expensive moving servers from your own data centres to the cloud can be. Even Gartner (who I've never really trusted) have moved their position from promoting complete migrations to the cloud to warning that an estimated 40% of all cloud migrations will be reversed back to being complete onsite due to cost.

    Basically the days of the large capacity free subscriptions are coming to an end and we can expect most, if not all, of the other hosting companies to cut back their free options else the companies themselves face commercial collapse.

    Flickr have actually been quite fair about this, giving plenty of warning, the ability to download and recover your photos through their own batch processing, and having a decent cost unlimited subscription service with other benefits (such as pay annually and get 15% off your Adobe Cloud subscription).

    Oh on the Terms of Agreement - these also will always say thy can be changed within reasonable means when required, plus the actual subscription details will never be covered in them but will be just a vague concept.

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  12. #48
    Senior Member Pterodactylus's Avatar
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    As said for me itˋs mainly not a question of “free” or paid.
    I could easily afford a Pro account, but why should I settle on a site which will delete my content the first day I stop actively paying for their premium features (which I by the way not need, but this is not the point)?

    I want to settle on a place where my stuff (from today’s perspective) will outlast the relatively short period I would pay for premium features.

    And every user on a site sooner or later will fall back to the free user state (this is what will happen with 100% confidence to each account).

    Iˋm aware that there is no guarantee how long data on a provider will last really, but I see not a single reason to keep on using a provider where I already know that he won’t keep my data any longer than I would pay for his premium service.

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  14. #49
    Senior Member Deb's Avatar
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    Since Photobucket did what it did I've been using Fotki which gives a decent service. The lesson to be learned here is that you can trust no online company to safeguard your stuff, even if you pay for their services ( which I do). Sooner or later you will be faced with blackmail and if you don't pay up your historical photo contributions to boards and blogs will disappear.
    Regards,
    Deb
    My Blog

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

    I'm very happy to see flickr being less of a photo-dump and more of a showcase as it was 15 years ago.
    I keep between 150 and 300 pictures in there and only try to upload ones that are worth sharing; the free account was bound to be limited at some point and Yahoo! screwed up by trying to compete with google (who screwed picasa). I'm a bottom feeder, however $4/month it is not unreasonable to share large amount of pictures.
    Last edited by titrisol; November 8th, 2018 at 01:26 PM.
    Unix is user-friendly ; it's just picky about who it's friends are -

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  18. #51
    Senior Member Pterodactylus's Avatar
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    For me I‘ve found a new approach.

    I‘ve created an DeviantArt account for my drawings:
    https://www.deviantart.com/ptero-pterodactylus
    Still beeing busy to bring it up to speed (still more than 1 year behind).

    There I will publish all my Art related pictures, like drawings but also (in my eyes nice) pen or writing related pictures (e.g. what I post in the quotes thread).
    Long story short the good ones will be located there.

    As for Flickr:
    I will delete all the old pictures which have no aesthetically value for me from my account (and damage mainly old FPN threads with this action).
    Mainly keeping the newer stuff posted here I hope to reach the 1000 picture limit.


    I create also new free Flickr accounts, as it is now still easy to get some before Smugmug will take over the registration process next year and it will most likely be harder to create them.
    I will use these accounts only as storage space to post „ordinary“ things for forum usage.
    If one is full I will just move to the next.

    So finally they drove me away from using Flickr as my main content hoster.
    I will use them in the future only als storage Provider for ordinary daily pictures, not the (in my eyes) good stuff anymore.
    And of course not participating in their community anymore as well.


    So mission accomplished Flickr management

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

    As for Flickr:
    I will delete all the old pictures which have no aesthetically value for me from my account (and damage mainly old FPN threads with this action).
    Mainly keeping the newer stuff posted here I hope to reach the 1000 picture limit.
    I did that just before I got banned from FPN. All of my pictures were on Flickr at that time. I got slammed by the stupor moderator team because it does tend to mess up a lot of threads. Having said that though, the recent debacle with photobucket has created its own share of mayhem in that respect.

  20. #53
    FPG Donor ♕ Chrissy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    There was a time when I only selected all of my very best photos and uploaded them onto Flickr, but as time went on, my going out birdwatching hobby waned slightly, and staying in with fountain pens overtook it to become my first hobby. I didn't seem to upload anywhere near as many photos onto my Flickr account anymore.

    When I started my "inkyfountainpens" free Wordpress web-site, "KrazyIvan" recommended that hosting my images on Flickr would save me space on my web-site, so that's what I've been doing. I'm nowhere near to 1000 images on Flickr as most of my images that I place on this forum are uploaded directly from my computer and are hosted on here. This system is currently working.

    It's true that most of the images I'm now uploading onto Flickr are ink review images, so all of my birdwatching friends will get a bit of a shock if they see them.
    Last edited by Chrissy; November 11th, 2018 at 02:45 PM.
    Regards, Chrissy | My Review Blog: inkyfountainpens

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

    It’s funny how many people say “just upload to imgur”, as if they can’t do the same thing later down the line.

    And yes, you are right. Flickr will not be the only service that has done this. It sucks, but there’s nothing to do about it besides keeping a physical backup.

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

    That is a fact.
    This whole "cloud" idea is extremely dangerous for longevity of your stuff; and it is also incredibly more vulnerable to hacking than a external HDD

    Quote Originally Posted by adhoc View Post
    It’s funny how many people say “just upload to imgur”, as if they can’t do the same thing later down the line.

    And yes, you are right. Flickr will not be the only service that has done this. It sucks, but there’s nothing to do about it besides keeping a physical backup.
    Unix is user-friendly ; it's just picky about who it's friends are -

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    Senior Member Pterodactylus's Avatar
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    So mission accomplished, I’ve finished upload all the art related content I wanted to move to DeviantArt.
    New such stuff I will upload there in the future.

    Iˋve also deleted more than 1100 pen related pictures on Flickr.
    All of those I initially created for threads on FPN, so this damaged quite a lot old FPN threads.

    Iˋm pretty sure that almost none FPgeeks threads are damaged by this action (maybe single ones where I reused old content, but this is marginal).

    My Flickr account is now right below 1000 pics and therefore only a static dead store of the remaining stuff.
    As said I will use Flickr in the future to post common things I do not want to have on my DeviantArt account, using new free accounts I just created, but with no intend to participate in the Flickr community anymore.
    I will miss some of the posters there as they upload really good stuff there as well (at least till now, maybe this will change as some of them also used an Ad financed account so far).
    Last edited by Pterodactylus; November 16th, 2018 at 03:42 PM.

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  27. #57
    Senior Member ethernautrix's Avatar
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    I deleted more than 1000 photos, about 900 to go. Feels like I wasted $25 a year for 12 years. Didn't really use flickr as well as I could have. Moja winna.

    Maybe when I get serious it'll be worth $50/year.
    _____________
    To Miasto

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

    I used to use imageshack, and they deleted all my images when they changed their policy. I've been using Imgur for a while now, and so far so good. I figure if it's free, I'm getting more than I paid for. Before using Imgur I had my own website, and I'd put photos up on it with an ftp client (cyberduck, which used to be free but is now for pay, but cheap) and hotlink from there. If you already have a website, you can just add another page but not link it to the rest of the site, and that way you can use it for storage without visitors seeing it. Domains are cheap and Web hosting can be also. You can even get it for free, but as we all know, that can change in heartbeat.
    Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur. — Horace
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  29. #59
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    Default Re: Anyone else also affected by the latest policy change on Flickr?

    Well, this is not looking good. I finally received my email with a link to download my photos. It just takes me back to the Flickr page where you can request the link to download your photos.
    Fountain Pen Sith Lord | Daakusaido | Everything in one spot

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

    I got an email too. I suppose I should search my blog for Flickr links. What a pita.

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