Flickr is back with one tera for free

[Berndt]

In case some people didn't notice it yet, Flickr offers one tera for free now. No BS with pay and pro-membership anymore and even my old pictures are there again ( Flickr displayed just the last I don't know how many pictures recently, if you used it for free ).

[lloydy]

but they have ruined the site, and ripped off the people who had paid for the Pro level previously. The display of images is dreadful, they are bunched together with no white space, unless you use the view option which then displays the image on black ( no option to change )and puts the information and titles etc under the picture so you have to scroll down. What used to be clear and easy is now muddled and laborious. The official forum has about 20,000 complaints in the first day, and even now, 2 days later there is no response from anyone at flickr / yahoo.
They have redesigned the site to suit hand held devices such as smart phones, and enable prominent advertising. They simply have stopped caring about photographers who used and liked the site to show off their images, all they want is the smart phone user who posts throwaway pictures of themselves. We already have that kind of service in Facebook and other similar sites, but yahoo feel compelled to compete, so the photographers are out of the equation.
There's a general exodus to Ipernity, which is where I'll be going. Flickr have blown it.

[Stephen]

I agree about the changes, not at all helpful, I tend to use Photobucket to do postings anyway as it is straightforward.
Stephen.

[Randy]

That's one of the nice things about owning your own domain, I host my own photos.

[lloydy]

The best thing about flickr is - was ? - the social aspect. Once you become active in some groups, post comments on other peoples pictures, and post regularly, people comment on yours and soon you have a good network of photographers you like and share interests with. So that was good, it certainly helped me develop as a photographer.
but that is all changing, the CEO Marissa Mayer is on record as saying that flickr is too concentrated on words, her vision is one of a picture hosting site for people using mobile devices who want to send them instantly to other applications - she's chasing the facebook / instagram market and nothing is going to get in her way, certainly not photographers that want to display and present their pictures in a good way, that leaves unused pixels on the screen! and then talk about the pictures, that's a waste of bandwidth that someone can use to host a picture of a teenagers breakfast for her bestest friend to see!
All the changes to flickr are made to cater for that group of people, and the changes are deliberately engineered to make it difficult for photographers.

Sadly, some of us have been using flickr for nearly 10 years and developed a large group of contacts that we socialize with on flickr through our love of photography. And it's nice to see the statistics - they've gone as well - which tell us how many people have looked at our pictures that day. I've been averaging just over 300 views a day ( my best day was about 3,700 ) which I was very pleased with, even though some of my contacts were hitting close to 10,000 a day. The stat's drilled down to each individual image, and that was important to show if other people liked it.

It's gone, overnight a service many of us paid for has been ruined, all in the name of chasing advertisers that want the facebook demographic.

[Berndt]

Lloydy, I can understand the anger about ripping off the people who had paid for the Pro level previously, but some of your critics are too hard, I think. Regarding the design, just the main page ( if you open Flickr and you are signed in ) has actually changed ( it wasn't really well designed before as well, I think ), the rest looks pretty much the same to me. The pictures become displayed on a black background, which doesn't look bad and everything works smooth on my iPad too. There might have been some adjustments to smart phones and tablets, but that's the beat of our times. Even me ... a few months ago, I said, I would never need an iPad and now, I rarely use my normal computer at all.

Quality wise ... well ... frankly speaking, I don't care so much. I follow about about fifty specific groups, I am interested in ( pictures, taken with certain cameras or on certain films and formats ). Those groups will stay "clean" anyway, because I doubt, that the main stream will suddenly use TLRs or Bencini cameras and overflow the data base with that.

Randy, I can imagine the nice things, coming with an own domain, but services like Flickr are also a community. I mainly use it for viewing other peoples pictures, leave a feedback here and there and get the same thing back. That's what I like. I wouldn't just want to display my pictures to the world ( they are not worthy enough anyway ).

But of course, Flickr is not the only service ( I do not get any money for promoting them here anyway ), but it's large and long living. If I imagine, I would need to upload all the pictures, I have already uploaded to Flickr over the years to another community again ... oh my ... plus the contacts would be gone and who can say, if another service will not go "pro" in the meaning of charging money for their services anytime soon too.

And maybe one more word about Facebook. In general, I would say, Facebook is for sharing private pictures with family and friends and services like Flickr are for publishing public pictures to the world. Strangely ( at least for me ), there seem to be a trent though, that many people obviously need to expose themselves to the rest of the world meanwhile. Sharing services like Instagram are full of pictures, I wouldn't share with the rest of the world ... but well, modern times these are

[Berndt]

Lloydy, I just saw that we basically posted our posts at the same time. So please do not consider my post as an answer to your last post, which I couldn't read before writing mine. But anyway, I think, I can see your points ... and you mine

[truls]

I have my own server at home, sharing pictures is a link away. If flickr or some other sharing site closes down many users will loose a lot of nice pics, I still have mine intact. Do everyone take a backup of shared images, or do we trust those services to the full?

[Berndt]

Back Up ? Well, I wouldn't use any online service to store my pictures anyway. They are all on my hard disk and from there, some might become uploaded somewhere, but I wouldn't delete the original files then.