by Martin Brinkmann on March 10, 2019 in Internet – No comments
Flickr revealed in a new blog post on the official company blog that it made the decision to exclude Creative Commons photos from any limit imposed on users on the site.
The media company SmugMug acquired Flickr from Yahoo, part of Oath and owned by Verizon, in April 2018 for an undisclosed sum.
Yahoo neglected the once-popular photo hosting community site Flickr for a long time. While Yahoo tried different things to regain some traction, e.g. by redesigning Flickr, it was clear that Flickr was but an afterthought for the company.
The new owner of Flickr made an announcement in November 2018 that angered many free users of the service. Flickr lets anyone register an account and up until that month, offered 1 Terabyte of free storage to all free users of the service.
The announcement put an end to the free ride. Free accounts were not going away, but were limited to just 1000 photos or videos. Free Flickr users who had more than 1000 media files in their accounts were offered two options: upgrade to Pro and benefit from a first-year discount to the price of the subscription, or get excess photos deleted automatically on the day the change takes effect.
Free Flickr users who did not want to upgrade to Pro could download their images to their devices to avoid losing access to them.
A turn of events
On March 8, 2019, Flickr announced that the company made the decision to put all media released under a Creative Commons license under protection. Means: free users may store more than 1000 media files on Flickr if they release any media file after the first thousand uploads as Creative Commons.
Flickr announced back in November that it would not delete freely licensed photos to avoid disrupting “the hundreds of millions of stories across the global Internet that link to freely licensed Flickr images”.
In this spirit, today we’re going further and now protecting all public, freely licensed images on Flickr, regardless of the date they were uploaded. We want to make sure we preserve these works and further the value of the licenses for our community and for anyone who might benefit from them.
The change may not help users of the service who pulled their photos and media from it after Flickr made the initial announcement, but it may help those who stayed on Flickr.
Closing Words
The initial announcement back in November was certainly not clear on how Flickr would handle media uploaded under a free license to the site. The clarification that Flickr put out this week makes it clearer.
Whether that is enough to convince free users to keep on using the site, especially if they were impacted by the changes announced in November, is unclear. Flickr does not reveal usage numbers.
Now You: What is your take on this? Good move by Flickr?