Yesterday I received this from Flickr:

Hi Aleksey Gureiev,

You have 197 photos stored on Flickr. Once you hit 200, you’ll need to upgrade to a Flickr Pro account or you’ll only be able to see your most recent 200 photos. Nothing will be deleted, and if you upgrade, you’ll have unlimited space for all your things.

Perhaps you’d like to purchase a Flickr pro account? Its unlimited and you get video and stats too!

You’ll even get 3 months free for purchasing before 30 September 2008!

Quite a surprise isn’t it? It’s a dishonest one. I started working with Flickr when there was only a limitation on the number of named sets and the monthly upload volume, and published links to my pictures in many places (forums, sites). Now there are two choices — upgrade or leave. Which one do you think I will choose? There are too many places on the internet including my own site where I can have a gallery of images to stick to their sick greediness.

I’m working on the personal gallery right now…

Comments from the past

herbert Says: August 7th, 2008 at 12:41

Hi,

this mentioned limitation was mentioned from the start of the flickr site. I got my account years ago and had the same limitations. not original image size not unlimited sets only the last few hundred pictures were shown

so, don’t be afraid of this limitations, they are well known and as far as I would suggest - an upgrad is much cheaper in time and money than building all from the scratch.

cheers herbert

Aleksey Gureiev Says: August 7th, 2008 at 13:12

I don’t think it was like that when I registered, since I wouldn’t have even started using such service then. What is 200 pictures if you plan to use it all your life? Nothing.

What made me think it’s new is that I wasn’t adding any images since mid-June and the message came only now. Googling a bit shows that it’s not new, but definitely not widely announced, and many of us were surprised in the same way.

Re building something new, I just hate the idea to be in dependence from something that I need to pay money for. If I decide to stop paying, I’m in trouble. There are currently very few of such dependencies in my life, and I simply don’t want to add more.

As for cheaper / more expensive … This is something you just can’t stop using over time once you started because of the links. The longer you use, the more tied you are. I have at least 4 members of the family now who are willing to share their images. Say 60 years for each: 4 * 60 * 25 = 6,000. Not a huge buck for 60 years of photo-sharing, but I could certainly find a good application for it. :) Moreover, building a decent-looking and extremely functional gallery won’t cost even close to that. Not to mention there are hundreds of galleries waiting for installation right away in the net. :)

Thanks for your points!

Markus Merz Says: August 9th, 2008 at 20:40

Aleksey, the pictures are only hidden i your photostream from you and the world.

If you use Flickt to post pictures this will always work. And as long as you link back to the single picture you are also always bale to get back to the picture.

The same is valid for tag or fulltext search AFIK.

I am using Flickr this way and I can live with those restrictions.

BUT what is far worse is that Flickr has this WTF censorship valid for users from certain countries (like Germany).

Aleksey Gureiev Says: August 11th, 2008 at 00:29

Hi Markus, thanks for the comment!

I didn’t know one can access old and already invisible pictures. Something to mull over now… R00KIE Says: August 12th, 2008 at 14:53

Hmmmm interesting …. but Aleksey you have a point, being dependent on some service is a bad idea, specially if you have to pay for it. In your case even worse I guess, you know how to do it and you have where to put it :D. In my opinion you can leave the pics you have there (that saves you the trouble of updating every reference to the pics) and create a new gallery in a place you control for new pics. As a side note, paid services can and have gone bankrupt and closed, zmail is an example. I don’t know if it was a widely known mail service but some of my friends that paid to have that service (with unlimited storage) lost important mails and contacts without any prior warning (ok they were careless, they should have backups). Choose wisely ;)

Markus Merz Says: August 21st, 2008 at 06:01

I forgot to mention that pictures are also always available in the group photo pools.

Another nice possibility is to archive the RSS feed via BlogBridge.

Aleksey Gureiev Says: August 21st, 2008 at 09:29

I have all my images on the drive, so that’s not the problem. I wanted them to stay visible all the time.

Just a thought: isn’t it a quickest way to pollute the service, to create many private groups and put your photos in them to keep them visible? :)

Eric Knight Says: August 24th, 2008 at 09:41

I have known about this limitation since I started on Flickr many many moons ago. however sharing is not my main use for the service although I utilize that feature. I pay for a pro acount and use it as off site backup for All of my Pictures at full resolution. So far I am up to roughly 15GB of images.