The new owners of Flickr will delete all images in free accounts and will only leave the last 1,000. With that decision they will assassinate historical part of the web. At least there are methods to export the images and not lose them forever.
the images and not lose them forever.
The new owners of Flickr on the verge of assassinating a historical part of internet
If you've ever created a Flickr account you've probably already received the email: last chance to pay Flickr Pro, which costs $ 50 a year or $ 6 a month. Those who do not can host a maximum of 1,000 images, which is the new limit of free accounts. The surplus photos will be eliminated forever ** as of February 5, 2019.
When SmugMug bought Flickr from Yahoo, he said he would continue to support the free accounts but did not give details. Months later they announced the limit: 1,000 images, if you have more we delete them, if you do not want that to happen, you must pay.
I completely agree and in favor of paying for services of this type and fortunately society in general has been accepting, over time, that some things have a price. Subscribing to online services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Netflix or paying for extra hosting in the cloud to Google, Dropbox or Apple stopped being weird long ago.
But behind Flickr there is a legacy too great that no longer depends solely on the owners of the photographs and images that have been uploaded during the almost fifteen years in which the service has existed. Many of them have, unfortunately, died. Many do not remember their access credentials and many probably created their accounts with emails that no longer exist, removing the possibility of resetting passwords.
There are millions and millions of images hosted by a service that arrived six or seven years ahead of time, the first great example of what was once badly called "web two point zero", one of the first big acquisitions to the positive and naive spirit of entrepreneurship that was reborn after the great fall of dot-com.
The step is especially bloody considering that Flickr, before being acquired, gave 1 terabyte of free space. Again, I agree that we should pay for a service, but the limit of just 1,000 photos and the threat of eliminating them forever for those who do not pay sounds like blackmail.
It is true that Flickr is a dinosaur that did not know how to adapt to the times. Not only did Instagram "eat it alive", also free and integrated cloud storage services such as Google Photos or the Apple Photos app have made sense of an independent photo hosting site.
What Flickr did have was an incredible community that has never been recreated around the act of photography again. Some like 500px have tried it, without success. It is a pity to see how SmugMug, the new owners are going to kill an important part of the web, for a tremendous lack of respect for the legacy of what they have in their hands.
How to backup Flickr photos
The only thing left is to backup the photos in ** Flickr **, put them on a hard drive, import them to a new service with similar characteristics or store them in our smartphone, which synchronizes with the cloud, our tablets or laptops.
To export and backup the photos we have on Flickr there are two ways:
1- From the "Roll" or Camera Roll, where you can select group photos (500 to 500) and download them in ZIP files.
2- From the album view you can download all the images contained, also in a ZIP file.