Flickr

Submission 8,772

About

Flickr is an image and media-hosting website available in multiple countries. It is a useful tool for bloggers and social media users as a means of embedding their own images into posts.

History

Flickr was created by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake and launched on February 10th, 2004.^[1]

SmugMug Acquisition

On April 20th, 2018, SmugMug, a Silicon Valley photo-sharing and storage company, acquired Flickr. SmugMug's CEO Don MacAskill said that the acquisition would be a chance to breathe new life into the company. He said, "Flickr is an amazing community, full of some of the world's most passionate photographers. It’s a fantastic product and a beloved brand, supplying tens of billions of photos to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Flickr has survived through thick-and-thin and is core to the entire fabric of the Internet."^[2]

Features

Since 2004, Flickr's main feature has been its free large storage capactiy for photographs. Users can upload, share and organize photos and albums, marking them public or private as they see fit. In 2013, after Yahoo purchased the company, Flickr announced 1TB of free storage space for users. However, following the company's purchase by SmugMug, Flickr discontinued the offer.

Pro Version

On November 1st, 2018, SmugMug announced that Flickr would be establishing new pricing tiers for users. Pro users, who as of this date, began paying $50 a year in 2015, would receive unlimited storage space for photographs.

Archive Shutdown

Free users, who had long enjoyed the massive storage space from the site, as of January would be restricted to 1,000 photographs "at up to 200MB each."^[3]

According to Fast Company, "Existing users with more than 1,000 pictures (or videos, which Flickr supports, though poorly) will have until February 5, 2019, to download them via a recently added tool that includes all comments and Flickr-specific data added to photos. After that, Flickr will start deleting photos from oldest to newest until just 1,000 remain in the account."

Some praised the new pricing tiers, calling the move "sustainable." Others denounced the turn. On November 1st, 2018, Twitter^[4] user @MichaelSteeber tweeted, "This Flickr news makes me feel unwell. I knew this was just a matter of time, but it still hurts. This is extremely devastating for the archival and preservation community. Can the Internet Archive step in here?" The tweet received more than 80 retweets and 180 likes in less than six months (shown below, left).

On February 5th, 2019, the day before Flickr began deleting the archives, some attempted to remind people to download their personal archive or they would be deleted. BuzzFeed writer Katie Notopoulos tweeted,^[5] "Today is THE LAST DAY to download your old Flickr photos (over the 1000 pic limit) before Flickr deletes them!!!!! DO IT!" The tweet received more than 100 retweets and 50 likes in 24 hours (shown below, center). Twitter user @merbroussard tweeted,^[6] "Flickr’s mass deletion is a reminder not to trust cloud storage." Additionally, they shared an article by Slate^[7] about the risks of cloud storage (shown below, right).

Several media outlets covered the shutdown, including Slate,^[7] BuzzFeed,^[8] Time,^[9] The Verge^[10] and more.