SmugMug, a professional photo hosting service bought Flickr in April of this year and the first major change has been announced under the new ownership.
For users, who were offered as much as 1 TB of free storage, they are now limited to 1,000 pictures only on the popular photo-sharing platform.
Unfortunately, ‘free’ services are seldom actually free for users. Users pay with their data or with their time. We would rather the arrangement be transparent
To think about the costs of servers and maintenance, this is a good step taken by the company but for the free users, it is not the ideal news.
The users have time until 8th January 2019 to save their photos or upgrade to Pro if their accounts exceed the 1,000 photos limit. After 8th January, free users won’t be able to upload more than 1,000 photos or videos.
And starting from 5th February 2019 the free accounts that are over the limits will have their uploaded content deleted until they are under the limit of 1,000 photos and the process of deletion will start from the oldest content first.
As for the upgrade to Flickr Pro, it will cost $49.99/year and the Pro customers will be given unlimited storage for photos and videos, no advertisements, increasing the video playback time from three minutes to ten minutes, partner discounts including Adobe Creative Cloud, custom portfolio sites and much more.
To make the deal, even more, sweeter, Flickr is offering 30% discount to the users who upgrade to Pro before November 30th for the first year. Another thing that users won’t have to do is use Yahoo to log in into Flickr.