Flickr Off

There was a time in my internet life that I used Flickr on a daily basis. The professionally focused photo sharing site was a great way to post my favourite pictures of life, activities and lots and lots of action figures. I enjoyed being part of a social group that shared in each other’s achievements and were really supportive as ew each developed our photography skills.

But times changed, and suddenly we all had cameras in our phones and the idea of posting to Flickr lost it’s lustre. Where I used to go away for the weekend and come home with a few dozen photos to sort, now I had hundreds to scroll through, the vast majority of which were slight variations on the ones either side as I snapped off a bunch back to back.

I also became a dad, and kids take up a lot of time. 

It became so much easier to just post instantly to Twitter or Whatsapp to family members. Going then and posting to Flickr seemed like such an additional chore, and I quickly let it slip away. I’m fairly certain that I paid for a year or two or Pro membership in the last few years that I hardly ever used. 

So it has been that my once beloved Flickr account has sat idle, the last upload being from December 2015. It still contains hundreds of photos that I have no other easy to access backup of, and quite possibly, no backup, end of story. It has photos of family, friends, toys, personal projects, favourite foods, and filled with countless treasured memories. 

Flickr, once an independent site, was a bought by Yahoo a number of years ago, but recently was sold again. The new company have made some... changes. Lots of the changes are great. New upload features, new streamlined login, a renewed focus on professional photography. But the biggest change is to the storage service.

Up until now Flickr has had unlimited upload. I have well over the new 1,000 photos limit on my account. As of early January that simply meant I couldn’t upload anything new unless I deleted down to less than 1,000 myself, or paid for a Pro membership. Not really an issue given that, as I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve stopped using Flickr, apart from occasionally returning to relive or reshape memories.

But, on February 5th, things change. As of that date, if you have more than 1,000 photos on you account and have not updated to Pro, everything older than your most recent 1,000 pictures will be deleted. Gone. Forever. No backsies.

And thus my time on Flickr has come to an end. Rather than simply lose everything, I archived and downloaded everything, including the titles and associated data. This was, thankfully, made painless through a feature on the site itself.

They’re now all safely on my hard drive, and right now, I’m uploading all those, literally thousands of photos, to my online Google Photos. I’ll be looking forward to going through all of them soon and sorting them into folders, and maybe sharing some wonderful memories on my Twitter. Some are hilariously low resolution compared to what I can take with even my old photo today. It really is a nostalgia trip.

I’ll be leaving Flickr as is for a while, but intend to delete the everything off that too eventually.

Finally, I want to close out but saying that, while the new Flickr isn’t for me, I’m excited to see what comes of it in the future. I hope this all leads to a rebirth of sorts and they find a way to make the site relevant again. I had a good time with the site once.

But, goodbye for now, Flickr.