Flickr is Ditching Yahoo Account Requirement and Giving Pro Subscribers Unlimited Storage (venturebeat.com) 36
Flickr announced a handful of updates to its platform and business model today -- the first major changes since SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting community from Oath earlier this year. From a report: Arguably the most interesting -- and welcome -- facet of today's announcement is that Flickr will no longer require users to sign-in with their Yahoo account credentials. However, not all the news is good -- those with free accounts will no longer have 1 terabyte of storage for all their photos. Many people speculated about what would happen to the formerly Yahoo-owned image-hosting platform when Yahoo became part of Verizon's family in 2017. While Verizon bundled AOL and Yahoo under the Oath banner, Flickr started shedding features and services, and its future did not look bright. But Flickr still claims north of 100 million monthly users, which is why SmugMug came a-callin' in April. In short, Flickr still holds a lot of potential if managed correctly.
Fast-forward to today, and Flickr has now revealed its new model for free and Pro-account users. Ditching Yahoo accounts from the log-in page will almost the most welcome part of today's news for millions, and as SmugMug notes in its announcement, it is among the most requested changes it has had since it took over Flickr. The change won't take affect until January, 2019, however, so for now a Yahoo account is still mandatory.
Fast-forward to today, and Flickr has now revealed its new model for free and Pro-account users. Ditching Yahoo accounts from the log-in page will almost the most welcome part of today's news for millions, and as SmugMug notes in its announcement, it is among the most requested changes it has had since it took over Flickr. The change won't take affect until January, 2019, however, so for now a Yahoo account is still mandatory.
It's even worse (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, for free accounts that currently have more than 1000 images, they're going to delete them from the site until you do have just 1000 images, starting with the oldest first. It's also worth pointing out that you lose the titles, the descriptions, the on-image notes, the comments, the presence in the groups. This is a huge hit.
It's still worse yet. They've made downloading your images to save them a huge task; when you go to the download page to get your images, after you take the time to select all of t
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Flickr looks to be getting good (Score:1)
It wasn't very clear from the summary, but the change to support 5K means whatever resolution your original image is, it will be rendered at up to 5K on the web site when viewing (people can also download the even larger original if you allow them).
They will also be supporting wide color profiles which makes a ton of sense, so I could post an image in AdobeRGB and having it display it much wider than sRGB gamut across most modern systems... I wonder if other photo platforms support that as well? Not sure.
I
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It's 1000 photos not 1000k (a million).
In 8 years at 10 a month you hit the limit. So it's not really useful for anyone wanting to share. Depends if you think there is value in the free users - they may not pay but they are traffic, which means ad revenue.
Google Photos is a much more suitable option for low photo / month users. You'd have to be a real "pro" to really justify $50 for the storage - so actually the other benefits to Pro are still the main selling point.
Yes, typo.. (Score:2)
It's 1000 photos not 1000k (a million).
My bad, was thinking of typing 1k but I seem to have added the zeros.
in 8 years at 10 a month you hit the limit. So it's not really useful for anyone wanting to share.
That seems like a huge amount of time and photos to allow for someone only paying through ads, more than enough to determine you really want the pro level.
Remember that part of Flickr's goal is that they do not want people sticking around who are not really into photography, because they had been kind of
Requiring to sign up that way is BS (Score:2)
What do you get that way? That people will suddenly use their Yahoo/GMail/Facebook account that you force them to create? No. They will sign up for that one single reason and never use it for anything but to log in to your site.
There is exactly one good reason to do this, and that is to offload user management to someone else if your user already have to have an account there to use your system. Those occasions are few and far between, the only thing I can think of is a gaming addon site for a steam game th
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Whoever manages the credentials gets your data, you get to log in without signing up for another account, and the site doesn't have to verify your identity. Everyone wins, if you don't care about privacy. If I don't care if google knows I've logged into something, then I just go ahead and use the google sign in. I never use the facebook sign in, though.
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What information do you get that you don't also get from a phone book? Unless of course you get a lot of people named Fakya Too and Nonafja Bizniz, that's something you sure don't get from the average phone book.
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Outsourcing to a single sign in has some good sets of advantages.
1. Your company isn't holding onto login names and passwords. If you have a security breach, the total damage done is much less. If the SS vendor gets hacked then they take all the brunt of the responsibility.
2. Users Password management sucks. You can talk about good password policy until you are blue in the face, but chances are you will not get anywhere, just because proper password management isn't natural to humans. So having one site ha
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On the other hand, Yahoo, Google, et. al. are not designed to be login providers. What would be ideal would be a company that has rigorous security and compliance testing, where the logins are not shared with advertisers or others, and remain confidential, where if people are signing up for user accounts, only the provider and the company who is using them for authenticating know the users.
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Yahoo is designed to be a login provider to Yahoo. Flickr was owned by Yahoo at the time.
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That people will suddenly use their Yahoo/GMail/Facebook account that you force them to create?
I thought Flickr required you to use a Yahoo account because they were owned by Yahoo. "Have an account with us to access our service" isn't terribly unreasonable.
All of which is irrelevant as the new owners are removing that requirement, which makes the rest of your post entirely redundant.
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You could use Flickr like that (Score:2)
Although I agree there is a case to be made for a service exactly as you describe, Flickr Pro could be used like that:
1) Unlimited storage, and unlimited photo original size. As soon as they support 5k and expanded color gamuts I'll probably be uploading TIFF files anyway.
2) On Flickr you can mark any photo with varying levels of access including non-public.
3) Flickr does not sell your photos. I think they may scan them automatically for auto-tagging, you may be able to disable that.
In fact I already bac
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So let's go over this business plan.
1. Photo backup service that is not intended for sharing, encrypts photos on the client before being sent up, and has a EULA that does not cede ownership to the cloud provider,
2. ???
3. Profit
You're missing step 2 there Sparky.
i.e. How are you going to pay for the servers / bandwidth / back-end ? People have been conditioned that "free is good enough" not realizing THEY are the product.
How many people _actually_ care about your service? Because it sure isn't the mass mark
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2. ???
You pay for the service?
I think Adobe's "Creative Cloud" already offers some form of this. (Though not sure about the "client side encrypt" part.)
Unfortunately, free-but-encumbered is always going to be orders of magnitude more popular than anything that users have to pay for, regardless of how little may be charged for it.
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Could you back up your phone's camera roll to your PC, then subscribe to Tarsnap to back that up to a server?
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What part of that "photo backup service" isn't just a backup service?
Unlimited Storage (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure "PRO" users have had unlimited storage for some time now.
What is different is that PRO accounts now seem to cost $50 per annum, as opposed to $25 per annum, with no improvements to service.
That's news-worthy, IMHO!
Never know where to post stuff (Score:2)
The last time I looked around at the various options (many years ago, I'll admit), it was somewhat unclear where exactly I should post my photos. At the time, it kinda felt like:
SmugMug - If I want an aesthetically pleasing gallery, that's organized and easy to browse. But no social features.
Flickr - If I want public social interaction on my photos, with gallery organization as an afterthought
Facebook - If I want my friends to actually know I took any photos at all, because they'll never notice them if post
Post toFlickr primarily, with Facebook secondary (Score:2)
I went through the same evaluation as you (also looked at 500px, which I just never liked the interface of, and Instagram, which I use but really hate the interface of).
A good solution these days is to post to Flickr first, then post that Flickr link to Facebook as Facebook parses it pretty well. That way the users get a much nicer viewing experience when they click on the photo as they are taken to Flickr.
Someday I'd love to do my own gallery site but if I do one it would probably end up being a thin shel
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One thing that would really help, is if the "social interaction" could be tied to the content itself... And not the site someone first notices the content on.
Of course this would require some level of protocol/backend cooperation between all these sites, which we know will never happen.
(Only underdogs seem to want to play well with others, as the dominant players rarely have any incentive to bother.)
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I sort of agree, but on the other hand whatever I share on Facebook I'm generally fine with the comments staying there... if you are putting in the Flickr link the viewer has the option of where to put the comments. So non-serious viewers will just see the smaller image on Facebook and comment there, which is fine, but anyone wanting to take a better look will go to Flickr to view and probably comment there. It seems like that would lead to more serious comments (or at least comments from more serious vie
Great idea (Score:2)
That would be greta to have an updated HDTV Flickr app. I wonder if they have plans to enhance the Flickr API's for third party support...
1000 photos? (Score:1)
This is just a push to make free users to become Pro paying users. 1000 photos is nothing if you use Flicks as a backup for you phone camera. God, I did not want to do Google Photo but looks like I'm being pushed there. Thanks Flickr, you were good, but nothing good lasts long.