I'm on flickr and the semi-regular emails over the past few years telling me that I have private photos which will get deleted soon, would be my reason.
I understand that you're trying to monetize your business and I think that is important, especially since you're here commenting on an open source alternative.
But, sending multiple emails to customers with a threat to delete their private photos unless they pay, is a kafkaesque way to do business. Sorry, I'm not going to pay for something when I'm treated with actual hostility...
April 19th 2022: [IMPORTANT] Free account limit enforcement changes.
May 12th 2022: FINAL NOTICE: You are in violation of our free account limits.
Oct 6th 2022: Reminder: Your account is in violation of our free account limits.
It seems that after Oct 2022, someone realized this wasn't a good idea and the emails stopped. I just logged in and checked and still have everything there. What is the point of paying, just to silence the empty threats?
I think "actual hostility" would have been simply shutting Flickr off, something Yahoo was ready to do. (Post acquisition, they later publicly admitted they regretted not doing just that[1]). I'm surprised you view getting notices that you have the opportunity to download your content (or pay for it, your choice) to be hostile. Is it less hostile to simply delete the data with no warning, like hundreds of other services have done?
We've tried hard to thread the needle between fixing Flickr's business model (it was losing tens of millions of dollars a year when we bought them, primarily because giving away 1TB/account for free is not sustainable) and giving people plenty of time to download their photos prior to deletion.
Tough problem, tough situation, but I'm largely proud of how we've handled it - there's been plenty of runway and notice for people to get their photos back if they prefer not to pay (either scenario - paying or downloading - is fine in our minds, but losing photos is not). We're not holding them hostage or anything, we want everyone to have them, one way or the other.
Email open & click rates being what they are (low), we carefully tracked them, plus download and/or subscription rates, to determine how frequently to contact people so we could have a high confidence that most people knew they had a choice and had the chance to make it.
Your photos over the free limits will be deleted, eventually. I don't know when, for your specific account, but it's certainly not just to "silence empty threats". It's not a threat, it's a statement, and it was intended as a courtesy.
I'm glad you have a choice AND you _know_ you have a choice.
I've been a flickr user since 2005. I haven't uploaded a single image since 2014. Why? Because the quality of the service went downhill and I knew that it would eventually go away.
I think we have different perspectives on things. Flickr wasn't a way to archive content, it was a way to share it before social media showed up. The need for Flickr died over the years.
I don't really care if Flickr deletes the photos or not, they were all backed up when I originally uploaded them because I've been conditioned to services just deleting content on a whim. Those of us in crypto say, not your keys, not your coins. Similar mentality. I'm accustomed to hostility.
Sending a FINAL NOTICE and then a more friendly reminder, and then not doing anything, is hostile behavior intended to extort people to pay money for a service that really hasn't seen any improvement in a very long time.
My $0.02... listen to them and shut it down and stop burning money on it. But you won't do that cause 'the choice' must be profitable enough to keep it going.
Thanks, again, for the discussion. I really appreciate it.
I'd argue that we have the same perspective on things - Flickr is a way to share, not archive. (Archival may be a wonderful side benefit, but community and connection are what makes Flickr magical, archive is a bonus) Yahoo had a different perspective. We're attempting to reverse it.
And we're succeeding. Across every metric you can imagine, Flickr is the healthiest it's ever been. More active users, more engagement, more connections, more revenue, more of everything - except people treating it like a "photo dump".
Most importantly, our members are ecstatic about it, it's now profitable and cash flow positive, so not in imminent danger (and we're trying to build it, sustainably, for 100+ years[1]). IMHO, it's not nearly enough, yet, but the trajectory is awesome. It's working. And it's working without invading people's privacy, unlike nearly every other social media platform.
We haven't "not done anything". Your account, for reasons I don't know, though someone here at Flickr likely does, hasn't seen anything. There's a big difference. Other accounts have. Every account will, eventually, including yours. Sorry you got an extra runway. ;) We're trying to be VERY careful about deleting photos.
I'm glad you had (and have?) backups. We know definitely, though, that MOST of our members did not. You were an outlier, but our outreach to people without backups was very appreciated. They had a very clear choice, we didn't hold their photos hostage, and that mattered to them.
It was definitely not intended to extort anyone - the options were very clear: download your photos and/or pay for the storage. (I think "and" is the right choice, but I'm biased... I also don't keep my photo archive _only_ on SmugMug and/or Flickr). The vast majority downloaded, rather than paid, and we view that as a win.
We gave people years to learn, choose, and act. I'd say that's pretty generous, and more generous than nearly any other troubled Internet service I've ever heard of. Are you aware of one that's been more generous? If you DIDN'T have backups, would you still have found our emails hostile?
I would appreciate answers to my prior questions, which you didn't address. Were we more hostile than simply turning everything off? It was a binary option. We chose to give people years of choice instead of deleting their photography.
Logging in, I have to type the 2FA code that is emailed to me because someone thought it would be a good idea to use type="number" instead of type="text". Thanks to browsers being the way they are, this means you can't copy/paste the number from an email, into the field. That says to me that people aren't actually giving you the feedback that you might need, or that you don't care enough to fix small UX issues.
When I see the home screen, I am presented with 3 friends with pro accounts, who have been using your service for years. Some as long as I have. F1: last upload 2011, F2: last upload Oct 2023, F3: 2021. What this says to me is that people are paying for storage and are not actively using the site. The non-paying friends are 1-5 years ago. Those aren't customers, those are people who fell into the trap of paying for something because it was a lower bar than migrating somewhere else.
Of course what I see is different than what you see, that's why I think our perspectives are so different.
Ok, so you're an outlier. Which is ok - we're probably not building the right service for you or your 3 friends (who can easily download and stop paying - we're not holding them hostage). We're definitely not trying to build for everyone - we have a target in mind, which is consistent with Flickr's original target 20 years ago, and you're probably not it. We're 100M+ members, not billions, and proud of it because we're focused.
I'm sad that you keep dodging what I view as the more important questions after you accused us of "actual hostility", though. I'd really love to understand how we missed the mark for you, and how we've been hostile, in case that applies to non-outliers and it's something we can improve on.
Was offering years of downloads on a _free_ service hostile? In what way? Was delaying deletion to give more people more time to download hostile? Why? Do you really believe hundreds of millions of consumers all had backups? What other similar Internet services are better examples of handling a situation like this?
Or are you just trolling and I've been feeding a troll (if so, congrats, I feel like my troll detection is relatively high)?
I'm not trolling. I'm just having a conversation trying to find a middle ground, but I don't think we are there at all. Especially since I'm in the bucket of outlier.
> I'd really love to understand how we missed the mark for you, and how we've been hostile, in case that applies to non-outliers and it's something we can improve on.
I thought I answered that above:
"Sending a FINAL NOTICE and then a more friendly reminder, and then not doing anything, is hostile behavior intended to extort people to pay money for a service that really hasn't seen any improvement in a very long time."
---
This conversation got me thinking about the history of things given that I've been a member of that site for 19 years. So, I went searching. This is a pretty good article I ran across from 2019:
The whole reason I'm having the conversation is that your statement is full of opinions, assumptions, and falsehoods. "not doing anything", "intended to extort people", and "hasn't seen any improvement in a very long time" are all incorrect. I can't find the truth, and I'm a truth seeker.
Let's start with the facts:
1. You have a free account and pay $0 for the service.
2. You received a few emails informing you of our choices when we changed the free account policies and limits.
3. Your choices included downloading your content, paying for the service, and/or closing your account.
4. You (and everyone) then got more time to make your choice than we'd originally said, for free.
5. Your account, for some reason, hasn't seen some of these changes, so you got even more time to make some of those choices, again for free.
None of that sounds hostile to me. I'm not sure who would consider that behavior hostile (more choices, more time, at $0 cost). Despite the depth of the conversation, I'm still struggling to understand (but, surprisingly, still open to the idea of) how we can be accused of "actual hostility".
Now, let's take your false statements:
- "not doing anything": I can assure you we've done many things, to many accounts. Using an online search engine will reveal plenty of examples. Why has your account not seen some of them? I don't know, but speculating that we haven't done "anything" is simply not true. Even your account has seen many changes, perhaps just not the one you highlight (removing your excess private photos). Try uploading more than 1000 public photos, as just one example of doing something.
- "intended to extort people": Simply not true. The choices were clear and the timeline was, and in your case, remains extremely generous. I happen to know the intent (not deleting any photos for as long as we possibly can) and you do not. Further, every action we've taken supports this intent. We didn't, and don't, hold any photos hostage for payment or anything else. There was no extortion, and there was certainly no intent to extort.
- "hasn't seen any improvement for a very long time": While it's possible you haven't seen any of YOUR preferred improvements, the list of improvements since we took over is long and consistent. We're averaging ~10 material improvements in the form of new features, upgraded features, and significant bug fixes, each month, for the last ~5 years. (Thousands of minor bug fixes, too) They're all well-documented on our blog[1] and in our help forum[2]. Our members agree, based on all of the feedback and data we see.
I typically love conversations like these, with "delightfully discontent" customers, because that's where the real value for learning and growth usually lies, not the thrilled customers I tend to meet day in & day out. I want to learn something here, so I and we can improve. It hasn't happened yet.
We clearly fucked up - you're upset, and you're bothering to engage. I just can't figure it out. Probably my fault. But I'll keep trying. :)
I appreciate you correcting some of my falsehoods. However, I'm basing this on my impressions based on my experiences, and therefore valid in their own way.
I don't appreciate you basing your response on the idea that I'm a $0 service customer, so that I shouldn't expect anything. Nothing is ever free. My public photos drive clicks to the site and therefore paying customers. I don't get paid for that service, but you do.
We are going to have to agree to disagree on the emails. You say "simply not true", but ignore the simple fact that unless I pay for something that was previously otherwise zero cost, my photos will be deleted. Your counter argument to that is that at least the site is still up and running or that I can download the photos I already have archived. Again, that's your choice to try to bring the site to profitability, for your own financial benefit.
I'm glad you have so many happy customers. Seriously! I'm also not upset or angry and I don't appreciate being boxed in like some freeloading curmudgeon. You asked why one would move on from one of your services and I responded in kind with what I felt was valid feedback. Nothing more, nothing less.
I see this as a masterclass on how to fail to convert a 19 year member of a website, back to a paying customer.
Yes, I used to pay for Flickr Pro. I stopped when I found that it wasn't providing me value other than "we will delete your private photos" if you don't pay up.
By the way, I did at one point look in the UX to see if there was a way to be able to view just my private photos so that I could delete them myself, but it wasn't obvious in my searching. It felt like it was intentionally difficult to even see if I wanted to keep an account.
Never once did he ask the simple question: "What can we do to convert you into a paying customer again?". Everything has been some sort of weird truth seeking mission to prove me wrong.
You can't seriously expect them (or anyone) to always grandfather in old free accounts after starting to charge money, can you? Bandwidth and storage is not unlimited.
The fact that he even engaged with you at all, and to the degree he did, was incredibly kind and he showed much restraint, kudos to him for that.
But you continued to double-down on your opinions and think you're more important and worthy of his time than everyone else. Why is that?
> You can't seriously expect them (or anyone) to always grandfather in old free accounts after starting to charge money, can you? Bandwidth and storage is not unlimited.
Never once asked for that. Although, let me remind you that he does in fact make money off driving traffic to my public images (and everyone else's as well). If he wants to give away that service for free, it is his business choice to do that.
> The fact that he even engaged with you at all, and to the degree he did, was incredibly kind and he showed much restraint, kudos to him for that.
Agreed. Kudos to him!
> But you continued to double-down on your opinions and think you're more important and worthy of his time than everyone else. Why is that?
I guess it is my fault for sticking to my opinions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thank you. Your project looks really neat! Let me know if we can ever collaborate. More great services for photographers in the world is always a great thing, especially if they avoid lock-in.
Feeling frustrated is totally justified. I'd feel frustrated, too. And no-one is more sorry that you're feeling frustrated than I am.
However, "total radio silence" is not fair. We're very active, and very vocal, about our status updates and progress we're making on the Flickr Help Forum, on our blog, on Twitter, etc. In particular, Flickr now has a CEO (me) who frequently engages with the community and customers to keep them informed, something Flickr hasn't enjoyed since ~2005.
We even have a status page, with frequent realtime updates, which I believe is a first for Flickr: https://status.flickr.net
There is a single feature, Camera Roll, which is still offline undergoing maintenance. No-one is happy it's offline, but it is what it is. It relied on technology internal to Yahoo, which we had to leave behind when we recently exited their datacenters. Given the hard deadline and the vast size, scale, and scope of the Flickr service, we managed to move everything (while keeping it online) except this. It will be returning shortly, but it's not quite ready yet.
I hope you'll stick it out with us, because we're nearly done migrating one of the largest web services on the planet, which means we get to focus on building again instead of just copying. The future is bright.
Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder, CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug, the company that acquired Flickr from Yahoo last year.
I'm an early adopter to flickr, more than a decade ago.
I can say that I did rely on Camera Roll and felt it was a much needed, but somewhat incomplete in scope, tool to flickr.
I would be one of the users who relied on it, after years using Organizr. So, there are some of us old timers who used it regularly. Luckily, a strong experience with Organizr allowed me to cope with its downtime.
I look forward to its 100% bill of health return.
Might I suggest as a request, that Camera Roll be incorporated in some way to view and manage our Favorites Album. There is no longer any way to quickly access a list of Favorite images from a decade ago without trying to scroll through countless webpages...only to find the browser and flickr server crashes. That's been a very old bug on this interface, btw.
Thanks for the update. As a long-time Flickr user, I too miss camera roll. The AutoUploadr and Camera Roll really got me connected to Flickr and I use it hourly on my iPhone, I have limited time on my iMac, Organizr is confusing and difficult on the iMac, impossible on the iPhone.
I am also an old-time programmer, starting on 6502 machine language, so I understand programming challenges even though I have never dealt with them on this massive level.
Please continue posting updates wherever is convenient for you, I know the users on the Flickr help forums are quite opinionated and fond of their own words so I understand a bit about not posting programming issues there.
I appreciate your response. That said, in the Flickr Help Forum that everyone is directed to when asking about Camera Roll, there has been absolutely zero update for months (plural!) about its status. I have tried to find other updates elsewhere on the web and failed, do they exist?
Furthermore, calling Camera Roll just a feature undermines its significance. This isn't just removing some insignificant feature like "search by focal length" or whatever. Camera Roll _was_ Flickr for many people. Not most of the total users, sure, but for everyone I know it was. For half a decade Flickr pushed it as _the_ way to use Flickr. It was what you saw first upon opening Flickr, and for any users to Flickr that joined in the last five years it was basically the entire interface.
Then it disappeared, supposedly for a very short time which then became very long... And then the updates stopped. During that entire time, myself and everyone I know that uses Flickr basically stopped using it. This includes people like me who pay for Pro. It became worthless.
The frustrating thing is that I really loved Flickr. I loved it so much I considered applying for a job there as the first job I've applied for in my life (I never apply for jobs, I just get referred to the company usually.) I loved it so much I evangalized it to my friends, family, random strangers.
But then the core Flickr interface, the way everyone I know managed and viewed their photos for half a decade, disappeared. And it's still not back. With the time, and the silence, I grew frustrated, and so did many people. I can't use it without Camera Roll, and everyone else I know can't either.
I really, really want Flickr to succeed. But this whole thing really stings hard.
Again, I'm sorry about Camera Roll. I understand your frustration. But perhaps I can share some insight into what's going on and why:
- The choice to finish moving Flickr or not was literally the decision to keep Flickr on the planet or not. There was no wiggle room in terms of timeline or resources to get the job done. So we had to make some hard decisions, because I, for one, didn't want to see Flickr disappear entirely. For good. This was more likely than most people understand. (See: https://www.vox.com/2019/1/23/18194865/verizon-layoffs-aol-y... )
- Camera Roll wasn't used by most users. When we were faced with the question of "ok, we're going to have to temporarily shut off a major feature to meet this deadline", Camera Roll was the obvious one due to its relatively low usage. I'm sorry you rely on it so much, but it's very clear that's not common relative to other major features.
- Camera Roll being offline hasn't affected usage materially. There appears to be near-zero evidence that many people "basically stopped using" Flickr due to this feature being offline.
- Based on your comment, I checked with long-time Flickr employees who are still employed here, and none can recall Camera Roll being central or core to the Flickr experience, nor it being the landing page. Our usage data, both before and after shut-off, supports this perspective.
- One reason for a smaller # of updates about Camera Roll is simply that it's not done being rebuilt yet. We prioritize time spent building things rather than time spent updating people with "Still no update". I think most customers would rather have us ship it sooner rather than talk about it more and ship it later. The last updates are still true. It's not done, but we're working hard and it is coming soon, which we've said recently, more than once.
If you truly love Flickr, as I do, I hope this perspective is helpful. We (the royal "everyone on Earth" version of "we") nearly lost Flickr forever. SmugMug saved it, but we had to make some hard choices. So we did, and I'd still make them again. Flickr is in good hands, we're excited about the future, and we're excited to get back to building again.
Well, that's certainly a different perspective. I appreciate it. I think many of the users who are so frustrated by Camera Roll's prolonged disappearance would have gotten less frustrated had we received an explanation like this in the beginning.
Asking old time Flickr employees is good, but that kind of misses the point. Old time Flickr users generally stuck with the interface they knew, from what I can tell, and did not use Camera Roll as much. "New" Flickr users, aka those using it for less than a half decade (at least those that I knew) used Camera Roll nearly exclusively and never used Organizr. There was never any other way to view large numbers of photos or organize them on any non desktop device other than Camera Roll, for example, and for anyone who used Flickr on mobile it was not merely central to the user experience - it _was_ the user interface.
I'm extremely shocked that Camera Roll isn't commonly used relative to other features. I wouldn't believe it from anyone else :) Can you say roughly how often it was used compared to Organizr before the switch? (as those are the two only ways to organize your photos on Flickr.)
Regardless, I know first hand that a not insignificant number of people used Camera Roll for everything. Personally, Camera Roll's absence has prevented me from providing photos of important things to several people. I simply don't have the time to dig through Organizr to find and organize a selection of photos that was easy to locate before but is now nearly impossible.
I appreciate the work you all did to save Flickr, and I look forward to using Flickr again once it's usable for me.
Don, this very thread is one of the reasons why some of us Flickr members feel there is a very real communication problem between Flickr and its membership. This discussion should be happening ON Flickr, where members are asking about what is going on with Camera Roll. If there's time to respond here, there's time to respond there. Please.
Don - responding here and not on flickr makes the rest of us members feel unimportant. There are 34 pages (hundreds) of responses waiting for an update to the "You can stay updated on the progress here" landing page. Could you give us an update there with some transparency and timeframes? Thanks!
This sounds very interesting! What is the size & scale of your data, if you don't mind sharing? (How many documents, total storage footprint, etc) Thanks!
Two days? Scheduled maintenance began at 5:45pm PT May 22nd, and it's currently 12:10pm PT May 23rd. We're hours behind (this stuff is tough), but it hasn't even been one day, let alone two.
Business and pricing are not my areas of expertise, so feel free to ignore or improve on this idea. My suggestion is to use Flickr to upsell Portfolio and Pro SmugMug plans (maybe with a nominal discount of $1/mo for Portfolio and $2/mo for Pro). Flickr could be the place where photographers get feedback on their photos and improve their skills, and then SmugMug is where they build a more curated portfolio of photos to sell based on what resonates with people on Flickr. When a photographer has reached a tipping point of positive feedback on Flickr, they may feel ready to start selling their photos, and that's your opportunity to upsell an appropriate SmugMug plan.
Or if you're confident that you can identify photographers whose photos will sell based on engagement with their photos on Flickr, offer an introductory rate for the first year so they can test how well their photos sell. If they sell enough photos to cover the cost of an upgraded plan, paying for an ongoing plan is a no-brainer.
At least, that's my use case as a hobbyist. I currently pay for a basic SmugMug plan. I daydream of upgrading to a Portfolio plan to sell some photos (just for fun), but I don't know that I would manage to sell any. I'm now thinking Flickr might be a better place for me to start testing the water.
As an aside, thank you for removing the Yahoo login. That's been more of a barrier than you would expect for me every time I've wanted to use Flickr in the past. I don't use Yahoo for anything other than Flickr. I think I have more than one account, but I'm not sure, and I don't remember which account has my Flickr albums. It's just a mess. I'll definitely be giving Flickr another chance in January.
The price is annoyance but not hurting me.. what is hurting me usability, both Flickr and Smugmug can do better to serve me. If anything fix flickr’s Social experience and Smugmugs upload and stats reporting, as a basic paid tier I have no insights if my url only sharing pics are widely used or not, seems like a cheap tax to force me to upgrade just to see the number of views
For what it's worth, we definitely don't want Flickr to be more like SmugMug. Flickr is amazing and different and that's great. We want Flickr to be Flickr and that's what we're investing in. We'd be thrilled to have you back as Pro, and I promise we'll work hard to keep you.
One thing that's scary to me as someone who will be affected is the thought that one day, so much of my work could be just gone.
I am not a full-time photographer; there are runs of time every year where I spend a lot of of time shooting (e.g. live music gigs), and then long periods of inactivity.
I have over 1000 photos on Flickr. I've been a user for over a decade. And I found out about this change from this post, because I haven't been reading the associated Yahoo email that often.
So, leaving my account alone for 3 months = losing most of my photos forever.
Great.
Just the service I want to pay for.
I understand the business need, but perhaps could you take it easy on irreversible changes? Sure, make the photos over the 1K limit unavailable even to the account holders -- but let them buy the access back long after the change.
Not only you might get more subscriptions from that alone, but there's also this:
Unlimited storage might not be feasible for a fixed pricd. Photos are growing larger, dollar is getting cheaper - we're betting on HDD costs going down, but that's not a given.
You might need to have a change in the future.
Again.
And I don't want to lose data because I'd have missed that announcement - just like I missed this one.
How you treat your free users indicates what the paying attention ones can expect.
Please, for the sake of everything that's holy, give your devoted users some goddamn peace of mind that they can camp in the mountains for a year and don't return to see their data gone.
Yahoo! screwed up there - but two wrongs do not make a right.
Not all of us use the service every day. Take it easy on annihilating work and memories.
TL;DR: every account whose data you keep is a potential subscription. Every user whose data you deleted is a guaranteed loss of business and eternal scorn. Please take care of your intermittent, but devoted users.
It takes time (as in, many days) to notify >100M people. We're working on it. The blog post and assorted spontaneous coverage, like Hacker News, is faster.
Even then, targeting the most affected ones (those on free plans with more than, say, 900 photos) first is, I assume, a much simpler job that might save you from a bit of a public scrutiny and give those people an extra jiffy or two to act.
A 'devoted user' that doesn't pay for the service, doesn't read the emails they send, and logs on at less than 3 month intervals?
I keep my full photo archive synced between a server, two workstations, and two laptops -- spread across at least two physical locations. I can't begin to imagine the thinking of someone who keeps all their photos on a single vendor's system, especially without some sturdy SLA in place (and even then...).
> I can't begin to imagine the thinking of someone who keeps all their photos on a single vendor's system
Quite a few assumptions you are making here.
I have all my photos since 2003 backed up. But I didn't keep track of all the sets I shared with people over a decade (I'm wiser now), and selecting the photos to present to other people takes a long time for me.
>A 'devoted user' that doesn't pay for the service
By that logic, there are no devoted FOSS users, no devoted redditors, etc. And as SmugMug said: I was paying for the service with my data. Now they want me to pay with money, and I am OK with that too.
>doesn't read the emails they send
...they didn't even send any. I assumed the fault was on my part; it was not.
>and logs on at less than 3 month intervals?
My usage pattern is intermittent periods of heavy usage, and that has been consistent over the past 10+ years. That is why I call myself a devoted user; I've stayed with them through Yahoo! and SmugMug acquisitions, and haven't shared photos with anything other than Flickr in the past 5 years.
This is the point I am trying to communicate: devoted users aren't just the ones who use the service all the time.
I think complaining about changes being made to a free service is a losing battle, but I'll go along with you a bit longer.
It sounded sarcastic when you said:
So, leaving my account alone for 3 months = losing most of my photos forever.
Great.
Just the service I want to pay for.
But if you were actually paying them, this wouldn't be a problem.
And no, I don't quite understand your recent claim that you were paying them with your data - that's not paying, and clearly your expectations were not aligned with the actual contract (or absence of same) that you had/have with the company.
You've since stated you have all your photos since 2003 backed up, but you claimed originally that this change of policy for non-paying users would see you 'losing most of my photos forever'. So, which is it?
If it's just 'sets of photos that you've selected to share with people' then that doesn't really mesh with your earlier complaints.
Your other complaint - that you haven't received an email they haven't sent yet - is disingenuous. The announcement was made on their web site, and (I'm sure) emails will follow. Mail-outs are typically staggered over many hours, perhaps days - but you typically want the web announcement available first. In the unlikely event you don't get an email in the next couple of days (though it sounds like you don't read that email account either, and haven't in your ten years of using this service thought to change your account's contact email address) then I'll concede this point.
>and haven't in your ten years of using this service thought to change your account's contact email address
OK, I really need to ask: are you a Flickr user?
When Yahoo! bought Flickr and forced everyone to use a Yahoo! login, it became extremely inconvenient not to tie your Flickr account to your Yahoo account if you have one, and I do. Logging in to Yahoo! mail would automatically log you in to Flickr (still does!).
Furthermore, if you have several accounts, you can't get notifications from all of them on an email that's used for logging into one of them.
You just can't. You get an "email associated with another account" error.
It so happens that I use my primary email as a login for a Flickr! account that I use for live music photography only (and, by the way, no notifications there either!) -- but that account has <1000 photos, so it won't be affected.
The whole use-email-as-login policy that Yahoo! instilled on users is a clusterfuck, but that's what it's been, and simply setting a contact email on the account requires jumping through some hoops. (..I am very glad that Flickr will finally move away from that).
So I have to ask: are you a Flickr user, or are you just arguing hypothetically on behalf of SmugMug?
Anyway. My main point was that I see nothing wrong with holding data for ransom, but deleting it without recovery options on a short notice is a very, very bad move.
And three months for me is a very short notice in the context of my 10+ years of using the service.
I have a yahoo account or two, and I think I have a flickr account somewhere ... but as a general rule I don't / wouldn't keep a sole copy of data that I care about on a free-hosting system that I know can't contact me.
So, you are not an active user of the platform we are discussing here, you are not affected by the update, and you don't know what it is that I'm talking about except for in general terms.
In light of that, stating your opinion on whether I can call myself a devoted user, and comment on what I should or should not expect from the service that you are not using seems.. mysterious?
And I didn't even get into a fraction of features and data that Flickr stores with photos (comments, photos being part of a set, etc -- Flickr is a social network, after all) that are hard or nearly impossible to back up. We are not discussing the merits of backups here, but let's not pretend that users who back up their files meticulously will not be adversely affected if they don't pay up within 3 months.
You make it sound like I've never seen people on the internet whinge about how something they weren't paying for is changing their T&C's and the person who isn't paying for the service is very upset by this because ... reasons.
I think I can question your devotion to a service by how much you're willing to pay to use it (and how much you complain about it).
You appear to be complaining about having to stump up ~ USD$2 / month to continue to enjoy the same carefree usage you've managed to obtain for free for the last decade.
Aha - I see you redacted your complaint about a personal email not arriving after onethumb responded in another thread saying much the same that I did (email takes time to send / propagate).
When flicker announced 1tb free I never thought 'oh great that sounds like a save env for my images' I thought 'lets dump my images' there as a free backup let's look how long they will offer it.
Google's "free" unlimited photo storage comes with some costs. First, they compress and resize your photos. They're pretty public about this, and they do offer paid plans which don't do this. If you're fine with that, great, it's a good deal. Second, it's widely understood that they're likely mining data in your photos to profile and advertise to you. I can't know this for sure, since I can't see their source code, but other research shows fairly strong correlation evidence. (No idea if paying for storage removes this or not).
No need, its spelled out pretty clearly in Google's TOS [0]:
> Some of our Services allow you to upload, submit, store, send or receive content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
> When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.
> Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.
