I joined FlickR in February 2007. My account (@thivierr) exceeded a million views a decade ago and has thousands of images. At one time, FlickR was the best place for photographers to share their photos with each other and the world, and to discuss photography. It provided a free service, and a “pro” service, that was very affordable (no need to be an actual “pro”). For around $25-35 you had unlimited uploads, of full quality images, and no ads. There were statistics. There was a lot of traffic.
Sadly, that has all changed. Now, most people seem to have left. Their business seems to be failing. To deal with this, FlickR is now charging around three, or more times as much money for “pro” service, with a diminishing service. They say those who don’t pay will see a cap on the number of images to about 100, which is basically the same as closing accounts.
FlickR always made money from showing advertising to viewers of images on FlickR pro accounts (only “pro” user skipped seeing them). So, it’s rather obnoxious they are trying to make much more money from the people that are making them money already. Of course, hiking fees creates a death spiral. The higher the fees, the fewer subscribers, requiring the remaining subscribers to pay even more.
As of June 2020, I am just a “free” user. That should mean you can no longer see most images. Although, for the moment, it seems for the moment, the images are still visible. So far, the only change I’ve seen is the presence of advertisements. Anyhow, I am seeing this as pretty much a goodbye to FlickR, unless something changes.
I find it funny how many websites build their business by scraping FlickR content, to display ads. FlickR has all these images on their site that are businesses would love to have, to monetize. But, FlickR will just get rid of most of it.
There is unfortunately, no good alternative to FlickR that I have seen (though many try). You can find a tiny subset of my photos here at https://www.robertthivierge.com.
I don’t get to take many photos for public display anymore (for unrelated reasons). FlickR isn’t a big deal as it was once. But, it was a nice record of what I’ve done. I did download everything, and may put up a bunch somewhere else someone in the future. For now, I’m just putting a tiny sample here and there. In hindsight, I would have been more selective about what I upload anyhow. So, it’s not all bad.