Flickr’s new management has made a controversial decision for the new year, as you may know by now. As CNET summarises:

SmugMug, trying to strengthen its Flickr site as a community for photo enthusiasts, will limit free members to 1,000 photos and scrap the old policy of a terabyte of storage in an attempt to move toward subscriptions.

The move, accompanied by a 30 percent discount on the $50 annual Flickr pro membership through Nov. 30, is the first big business shift at the photo-sharing site since SmugMug’s acquisition of Flickr from Verizon’s Yahoo earlier this year. And while it’ll mean some members have to decide whether to spend some money or save their photos, it also means Flickr’s interests are directly aligned with those of its members, not those of advertisers, Flickr vice president of product Andrew Stadlen said in a blog post Thursday.

I have been a Flickr member since 2005, and a Pro member since maybe 2006. Historically, this is just one of the many controversial decisions Flickr members had to endure. I don’t remember the various changes Flickr introduced over the years, and making a list of them is not the point of this piece anyway; but I remember that the majority of them were not popular among Flickr’s users. The one I do remember was the site’s major redesign, which I truly disliked at first; it felt sloppy and user-hostile in some areas. It eventually got better. 

But this most recent move? It’s anything but controversial for me. I couldn’t welcome it more.

The bad guy here is not SmugMug, but Flickr’s previous management. Offering 1 terabyte of storage (with ads) to free accounts was a move of Google-like proportions. The problem was that Yahoo was not Google, and this is something more people should have realised at the time, not in retrospect. Do you think that 1 terabyte of storage space is really free? It’s not. Advertising, and your data being passed to advertisers, pays for it. The moment you remove advertising from the equation, giving such enormous storage space to free accounts becomes immediately unsustainable. I am as dense as osmium when it comes to understanding economics, but even I was able to figure this out.

From reading Flickr’s forums, the two primary pain points of this upcoming change are these:

1. Limiting free members to 1,000 photos means that current free members with more than 1,000 photos in their account will only have access to the 1,000 most recent photos, and all the older ones will be deleted (except those under a Creative Commons licence, if I got this right).
2. Grandfathered Pro accounts will be automatically charged $49.99 — the same fee as new Pro accounts — instead of $24.95 at renewal time, and there’s no discount or other promotion for them. Some users whose account is bound for renewal shortly are the most annoyed. But I’ve also seen a lot of old-timers like myself complain about this and manifest their intention of not renewing their Pro membership.

Here’s what I think:

• If you currently have a free account with more than 1,000 photos and you’re uploading materials that you feel have some value for the community, and for the Internet at large (historical photo collections, rare archival images, scanned documents, etc.), then subscribing to a Pro account should be a no-brainer, even at $50/year. If you feel you’re doing important work, and you think it’s unreasonable to pay the service that hosts your materials $4.16 per month, you could always try asking for donations or start a Patreon account.
• If you — especially after Flickr started offering 1 TB of storage to free accounts — began using the site as your personal photo dumping ground, and don’t want to pay to keep using it that way, consider moving your photos elsewhere, or separating the wheat from the chaff yourself, so that you can showcase your best work, not a whopping 250 bad shots, untitled and untagged, from that cool party you went last week. And hey, if you’re a hardcore cheapskate, you can always open more free accounts and fill them up, 1,000 photos at a time.
• People hate advertising, but — guess what — they also hate paying to have it removed. There is no free lunch, folks. There’s crappy food and good food, though. If in order to keep a service healthy and sustainable there’s a price to pay, so be it. And I believe $50/year ($4.16/month) is an entirely reasonable price to pay.
• Storage space has its costs. Don’t start your objections with “But Google Photos offers…” You know how Google makes money, right? You know Google isn’t a charity, right? When most of such costs are paid by advertisers, then you can offer whatever you want to your users ‘for free’. Also, take a look at all the free tiers from companies offering cloud storage services. If they are free tiers which also provide an ad-free experience, usually the amount of storage you’re given is not that huge.
• Old-time members with grandfathered Pro accounts should be reminded that Flickr started charging $49.99/year for new Pro accounts back in 2015, but kept the price at $24.95/year for all grandfathered Pro accounts with automatic renewal. This grace period, in my opinion, has lasted enough and has been a nice gesture for enough time. I’m sorry, but I just can’t agree with those who say that now Flickr is “charging too much, period.” I may agree in part with those who say that $49.99/year could be too much if there aren’t enough improvements for Pro members in return. But I don’t think the situation is going to stay the same after this significant upcoming change and shift. If it helps eradicate advertising, spam accounts, spam comments, I’m personally glad to start paying $50 a year for a place that’s been an overall stable home and showcase for my humble photos for the past 13 years. (Fun fact: after 13 years I still haven’t managed to upload 1,000 photos…)

In his blog post, Flickr’s VP of product Andrew Stadlen also said:

We want to build features and experiences that delight you, not our advertisers; ensuring that our members are also our customers makes this possible. […] The overwhelming majority of pros have more than 1,000 photos on Flickr, and the vast majority of free members have fewer than 1,000. We believe we’ve landed on a fair and generous place to draw the line.

I agree, especially if you consider that, before offering 1 TB of space to everybody, free accounts were limited to 200 photos. 

To me, it is obvious that these ‘drastic’ measures aren’t being done out of spite or greed. It is also obvious to me that behind this decision from the new management, there’s the intent of revitalising and redefining Flickr’s space and community, which I’ve felt going painfully adrift in recent years. If this change helps Flickr to refocus on being a place where people contribute their best efforts at photography, instead of encouraging users to treat it as just another cloud service to back up gigabytes of their stuff for free, then I believe this change can’t come soon enough.