Should I renew my Flickr Pro account?

September 10, 2018 11:06 AM

I've been using Flickr since 2005, and have had a Pro membership since 2006. Renewing my Pro membership has always been a no-brainer because, as a grandfathered member, I've been paying the same price ($25) for years. However, this year grandfathered Pro members must pay the standard membership price: $50. Should I renew?

I rarely use Flickr these days (I've mostly switched to Instagram) but it's reassuring to know that I have a backup for my 10+ years of photos. I don't care about any of the perks listed on this page—I only care about maintaining the ongoing storage and access to my existing photo library. Perhaps my needs will be met by the free membership? I do back up my photos in other ways, but the fact that my original Flickr uploads still survive—after thirteen years of failed hard drives and sunsetted hosting sites—is surprising and useful.

I don't earn a lot, so the price increase means this has gone from 'a fee I'm happy to let automatically renew' to 'a fee I now have to evaluate'. Or am I just being a brat? Please advise!

posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED to Computers & Internet (18 answers total)

Response by poster: I've just realised there's an official announcement about the price change on Flickr, followed by a billion disgruntled comments.
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 11:08 AM on September 10, 2018

You're not being a brat. Given how you use Flickr a free account is the way to go. Your photos will remain as safe as always and you can always start paying again if the benefits of a Pro account become compelling. The primary downsides to going with a free account are 1) you may or may not see ads when logged in and 2) you will lose the grandfathered unlimited storage (you'll still get the 1TB of storage which for most uses is unlimited).
posted by plastic_animals at 11:20 AM on September 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

frankly, seeing that that announcement page is not mobile friendly in this day and age (and company) would push me forcefully toward other options.
posted by rhizome at 11:24 AM on September 10, 2018

If it's of any use, this is the conversation I just had with myself:

"Dang, I didn't know that they were increasing the price of a pro account."
"Why did I sign up for a pro account anyway?"
"Oh, right, because of the space. Hmm, lemme see how much that would be affected - "
"Oh, wait, didn't they increase the storage space size like three months after you went pro anyway, and weren't you thinking that maybe you should cancel anyway?"
"Yeah, let's see what else I would get from a pro account."
".....Nuthin' much. And you use it even less these days anyway since you haven't been really travelling for the past year. And you have an Instagram account you never use, which you could use anyway."
"Okay - this isn't set to renew until March anyway, and I still have pro access until March if I cancel today. If I get spooked I can download everything in there onto my own desktop as backup, go to the free account and get pretty much what I would be getting anyway and get money back that I've been spending."
"Sounds good."

....So I just cancelled my own account. You're not a "brat" if you've decided you're not really using something that youv'e been unthinkingly paying for - you're a smart consumer.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:47 AM on September 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

I agree that it sounds like a free account will serve you just as well as the Pro.
posted by amicamentis at 11:57 AM on September 10, 2018

I have been there since the very beginning. It is absolutely not worth any money to me over a free account any more, and I honestly think there would be zero impact to me by not paying. With the third ownership change with almost zero change in direction of the company (so far) I am adopting a 'wait and see' methodology, but I'm damned if I will pay to do so.

I paid for flickr initially because I loved the place and really like the people. It has fallen short in a myriad of ways since about 2009 but I plugged along in eternal hope that supporting them would help them find their way back to the place it was. This hasn't worked, and honestly a free account (as it is now) is more than enough while I sit back and see what the new owners turn it into. if that is the same thing for you, then zero guilt.

Just make sure you back everything up now, because Smugmg really need to earn my trust before I have things purely on flickr, so that's a paranoia worth taking on, maybe.
posted by Brockles at 12:02 PM on September 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm not even considering touching Flickr again until Smugmug's folks fully divorce it from Yahoo's infrastructure. I sure as hell wouldn't pay up until that's done.
posted by SansPoint at 12:27 PM on September 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

I was pretty excited about the SmugMug news. I thought maybe they would be able to bring Flickr back to when it was awesome. But then I realized that I don’t even know what “back” means. The community that was there is long gone. I think SmugMug should put it out of its misery and turn it into something entirely new. Either way, I wouldn’t pay for an account until I knew what the future held.
posted by not_the_water at 1:41 PM on September 10, 2018

I'm somewhere in the middle of the above commenters. I've not so much unthinkingly continued to pay for it as consciously made the choice that $25 a year was a small price to pay in the hope that somebody would eventually rescue it from Yahoo. And somebody did, although since then the only sign of new life is that they updated galleries just last week. My renewal won't be until the spring and I think a 100% jump in price is pretty steep (especially when they haven't been particularly communicative about what's in store) but I still have a few months to make up my mind. I still can't bring myself to sign up for Instagram, 500px isn't what I want (and neither was SmugMug, for that matter), and the "hey, here's literally every photo I've ever taken" aspect of automatic cloud services isn't really what I want either. Even though I'm paying for an iCloud storage plan and I've got access to Amazon Prime through my wife's account, neither really replaces what I liked about Flickr so I'm not really using either of them for photos. I guess out of all those iCloud is closest to what I want, so if I dropped Flickr that's probably where I'd end up, but inertia is worth $25 a year. I still don't know if it's worth $50 a year.
posted by fedward at 2:10 PM on September 10, 2018

I was already skeeved about them being bought out by Yahoo, so the Smugmug was reason enough for me to jump ship. They haven't done anything to update their platform in years - at least at the time I deleted my account a few months ago.
posted by getawaysticks at 3:34 PM on September 10, 2018

One of the more inexplicable things Yahoo did to Flickr was to stop the modernization of Flickr's system architecture midway through that upgrade. The result was that some pages are mobile responsive, some aren't (like the Help Forum mentioned above), and some are a bit of both (versions of Groups in both beta and production). The Galleries were one of the features on the old tech stack. That they've been updated is a small sign of progress. That doesn't change my advice to go to a free account if you're barely using Flickr.
posted by plastic_animals at 4:39 PM on September 10, 2018

I don't have to pay again until May of 2020, so I'm going to hang tough for now. I like the auto-upload feature. Especially if I don't log in to Dropbox for a few days, I know my photos are being uploaded somewhere. It tidily uploads everything to Flickr's "Camera Roll", which is private unless you change the status of individual photos.
posted by clone boulevard at 4:44 PM on September 10, 2018

I was a diehard user who stopped paying as soon as they upped the free storage. In a world where Flickr was totally modernized and was even a blip on Instagram's radar, I'd pay again in a a heartbeat, but continuing to pay now seems like holding out for del.icio.us to come back.
posted by Juliet Banana at 8:00 PM on September 10, 2018

I hadn't really paid attention to the announcement of the price increase, and had been keeping my membership going largely through nostalgia and not really thinking about how I wasn't using any of the pro features any more. So, thanks for inspiring me to drop my membership. Since I'm using well under 1TB, there's no reason I couldn't just subscribe again if they came out with something that motivated me, and I've got plenty of months before my current subscription runs out anyways.

But, at least for me, it's time to turn off auto-renew and let that fade away.
posted by JiBB at 3:40 AM on September 11, 2018

Jeez, they kept that quiet. Piggybacking on the OP (sorry), if I was to turn off auto-renew, can someone confirm that my 36GB of photos currently stored wouldn't be taken down? From what I understand, I'd end up with ads (not a problem on my laptop, with adblockers) but I'd lose the automatic upload to the camera roll on my phone. That doesn't seem worth $49 a year ...
posted by essexjan at 2:00 PM on September 11, 2018

can someone confirm that my 36GB of photos currently stored wouldn't be taken down?

Confirmed at this point. We have no way of knowing what restrictions will be on future free accounts, so I'd suggest cancelling auto renew and backing up in some way now. I don't know if something like Flickrdown still works for archiving.
posted by Brockles at 2:14 PM on September 11, 2018

Free accounts have 1TB of storage, so your 36GB is safe unless Flickr drastically changes its offerings. In theory you will see ads with a free account but when Flickr was part of Yahoo it was Yahoo staff that handled ad sales. Flickr has no sales staff, so now that it is part of SmugMug there are no ads (you will see promotional ads for Flickr). No telling how long that will last.

You can bulk download from Flickr via albums and from the Camera Roll. Bulkr is a third party service that also lets you download in bulk from Flickr (there may be a charge, I'm not familiar with them).
posted by plastic_animals at 5:14 PM on September 11, 2018

Today's announcement might change your mind. Free accounts will be limited to 1000 photos now. Also, you can renew Pro for $35 before November 30th.
posted by soelo at 10:31 AM on November 2, 2018