Flickr.... More bad news for forums.

[generally01]

Anybody been on Flickr today and had the message that free accounts will be limited to 1000 pictures? For more storage you need to pay £50 per year and switch to a pro account.

I have nearly 10,000 pictures uploaded there, mostly because they promised 1tb free storage and I'm sure there will be plenty of others about to feel like they are being blackmailed in a similar fashion to Photobucket tried last year.

I'm willing to bet this will decimate almost all threads on here as pictures will start to vanish.

Thing is, I would probably have paid a few years ago but after they re-arranged the site the last time it has gone downhill.

Ah well, rant over so here are a few of my flickr pictures before they dissapear.

spotted september 8 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

giffnock show 2018 14 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

Wolfsburg trip day 1 85 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

Archies show 17 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

bridge of Allan show 2018 21 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

Aged Falcon by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

Big Caddy by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

Sunroof option hdr by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

greens by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

P1070061 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

volksfling 2015 12 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

P1050086 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

Monte Carlo 2016 24 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

Riverside retros 5 by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

volksfling 66wm by Dave Campbell, on Flickr

[HoTWire]

I've had a pro account for as long as they have been available, most of the people I follow have pro accounts. I'm sticking with them for the time being as they are the best of a bad bunch and whilst I got 80% of the way through developing my own full photo hosting solution (which would aim to take on Flickr etc.) I couldn't justify the running costs with the possibility that I'd never manage to bridge to actually being profitable.

I may resurrect that project though. I'm waiting to see if this change means that the people that have taken over Flickr are going to take it seriously and do some positive changes to the platform. If they ruin it I'll be super annoyed!

[The Jackeria]

Sad times, some of my favourite viewing is on there ...

www.flickr.com/photos/63416089@N06/albums/page48

"Honda Brochures" whilst being a pro account so likely won't be affected is a wealth of awesome, loads of new, loads of old if you look deep enough for it.

There are lots like this that aren't pro

[MiataMark]

Another long-time Flicker pro-account user, can't remember why I choose to 'go pro', I think it was because a pro account enabled you to be more 'organised' (albums etc.)

TBH in this day and age you can't really expect a provider to offer unlimited storage for free unless you want a site blighted by adverts (which currently Flickr is free of).

I find the upload facilities etc to be pretty good.

I'll be sticking with Flickr unless they hike the fees a lot (then I'll just host the images myself).

[luckyseven]

I haven't yet gone pro... but TBH £50 a year is only 15 more than I was paying to Photobucket, and the quality on Flickr is massively more betterer. I wouldn't begrudge paying that

p.s... great (and eclectic!) set of photos, generally01

[timmy201]

They have an offer at the moment of US$34.99 a year or £26 (if you upgrade before the end of the month)

I have over 4000 images in my free account now. I don't know if I have the effort to save 3000+ images and rehost them somewhere else. Perhaps I'll give them 1 year and see what happens

[droopsnoot]

I've heard about this, but I've just been onto my Flickr account and not seen anything there. Perhaps that's just because I only have 650 images on there are the moment, or perhaps they'll get around to emailing me about it.

Since the Photobucket debacle, I've been trying to upload images directly onto forums where it's possible, but not all forums support it.

[timmy201]

From their site
blog.flickr.net/en/2018/11/01/changing-flickr-free-accounts-1000-photos/
www.flickr.com/lookingahead/?utm_campaign=flickr-lookingahead&utm_source=Flickr&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=1000photos

[shagracer]

I happen to like Flickr always found it easy to use, so iv'e just gone Pro, I didn't like photobucket even when it was free and i certainly wasn't going to pay for that.....

[Deleted]

I've got 13,600 photos there based on the "we are free and always will be" tag they trumpeted which led me to sign up.....

[vulgalour]

I got burned with Photobucket so I don't really trust Flickr. I was a paying Photobucket user, I didn't mind the modest monthly fee and the service ran well enough that I didn't want to switch. Until they started messing about with it, and then jacked the price up to an unreasonable amount, and made the service worse. Looking for an alternative was incredibly difficult, Flickr was the best of a bad bunch but didn't offer enough to warrant me going pro, I just let them keep their adverts on my account, no big deal.

Now, if I start paying Flickr, I'm fully expecting them to pull the same stunt as Photobucket and I can't be doing with shifting all my material again.

The biggest trouble is that it makes me less inclined to keep a build thread now. The threads I have kept are absolutely full of holes because the images do a lot of the talking in a way words can't and Photobucket hit them hard, Flickr has already undone a lot of the work I did reuploading info and now I'm not inclined at all to reupload years of content a third time.

Ideally there'd be a forum I could upload to and pay a modest fee to cover the cost of hosting. Something where the costs and limitations are up front and fair and somehow protected from abuse by less scrupulous users. This is, I'm aware, an awful lot easier to say than to do.

I just want to be comfortable, I'm fed up of moving my stuff about. I don't mind paying for a trusted service, it's just that finding that trusted service is proving very difficult.

[Dez]

Unfortunately thats why I’m done with build threads on forums now too.
The only viable option for the amount of pics I used to upload is self hosting, something I don’t have time for as well as writing the threads. So now I just do diary style edited highlights via Instagram and fb. I simply don’t have time to build the cars, then self host and crosspost the pics AND write the build thread to annotate the pics. It’s killed forums dead on their ass for me.


Until someone reliably offers what PB and Flickr used to offer, there isnt another option.

[vulgalour]

The world is a poorer place because of it too, your threads were always massively informative because of the pictures and I learned a lot from them that I doubt I would have from a text wall.

Photobucket knocked over the first domino and it will forever change the way information is shared. Image hosting is not a particularly profitable venture. Everybody wants to share images, they just don't want to pay for it, in part because it's been offered for free for so long because ad revenue was always good enough. People don't like adverts, that's why adblockers exist, and presumably adverts are no longer working well enough to support the image hosting platforms which in turn means the free services are being removed or seriously limited.

Likewise, I haven't the time to self-host, very few people do. I suppose this is why there's more of a shift towards snapshots on social media and edited videos on Youtube (and really, how long is the latter of those going to last given recent issues with algorithms and demonitisation?) which is fine until you need to go back and reference something. Then you're back to relying on asking a particular person who knows a particular thing and hoping they're still willing/alive to be able to tell you that specific thing.

It feels a bit like having to trade your infinite capacity digital camera in for a single 36 exposure disposable point-and-shoot camera. It's not exactly like that, I know, but it's the nearest analogy I have. Of course, we got along just fine when we just had film, and we got along just fine before then by just painting pictures, but that's hardly the point.

Trying to be optimistic about things, perhaps this will see a more curated approach to build threads, rather like some of the earlier ones had to be because of internet limitations of the time. Perhaps we'll have more considered stories to enjoy rather than daily snapshots. Pessimistically, who really has time to sit down and wade through a full month of updates these days?

Some of the larger forums will continue regardless, of that I'm sure. Many of the smaller ones won't. I used to post to a lot more forums than I do now because of the difficulties of image hosting. Most of the things I post about require visual input, the hobby revolves around a lot of "look at this awesome thing" and "look at this, what is it?" so to take that away does make things difficult.

There are solutions, you can hotlink images from various social media platforms, though that does require the pictures to be there in the first place. You can make use of sites like Instagram and cross link from there. Trouble is it's a lot of work to have to rewrite each post for each location dependant on how they do things unlike image hosting sites that allow for a fairly painless copy-paste proceedure for multiple forums.

I dunno, I feel very uncertain about my future input here and elsewhere now because of this and I really haven't the attitude required or personal energy needed to keep up with social media and.... people.

[MiataMark]

I self-host some of my images, although the images aren't obvious to view directly.

Pretty simple to do;

• buy a domain (I pay less than the Flickr subscription for a number of domains)
  
• create a folder, or folders in the domain (Only needed to do once)
• transfer images to folder (use FileZilla or similar free FTP tools)
• add url to post

Can't see that that is much different to using Flickr or PB.

[vulgalour]

What do you do for security? What sort of limitations are there on storage and bandwidth?

The last time I did things that way I found it clunky, counter-intuitive, unreliable, and more expensives than the Photobucket subscription I was paying for a better service (until they messed that up). It's an absolute minefield to the novice to try and understand what services are safe and reliable and what ones aren't, especially when you're not particularly tech-savvy. I had to rely on a friend to help manage the info and understand how to upload and find things because the whole thing was baffling to me. I'm not alone in that either.

I haven't the time to be faffing about setting up my own personal image hosting whatnot, learning how to use it, and all the rest of it. I just want to click-and-go, like everyone else. I can still enjoy my cars without making detailed build threads and keeping abreast of updates and I want this to be fun, not yet another chore.

As things stand, the forum uploader is the best solution for maintaining a thread because it's there and straightforward to use for the most part. If nothing else, it's a good way to keep people using the forum because it offers something not all of them do.

[MiataMark]

Nov 4, 2018 16:42:55 GMT vulgalour said:

What do you do for security? What sort of limitations are there on storage and bandwidth?

The last time I did things that way I found it clunky, counter-intuitive, unreliable, and more expensives than the Photobucket subscription I was paying for a better service (until they messed that up). It's an absolute minefield to the novice to try and understand what services are safe and reliable and what ones aren't, especially when you're not particularly tech-savvy. I had to rely on a friend to help manage the info and understand how to upload and find things because the whole thing was baffling to me. I'm not alone in that either.

I haven't the time to be faffing about setting up my own personal image hosting whatnot, learning how to use it, and all the rest of it. I just want to click-and-go, like everyone else. I can still enjoy my cars without making detailed build threads and keeping abreast of updates and I want this to be fun, not yet another chore.

As things stand, the forum uploader is the best solution for maintaining a thread because it's there and straightforward to use for the most part. If nothing else, it's a good way to keep people using the forum because it offers something not all of them do.

It's not a image hosting solution as such, just think of it as cloud storage that can be easily linked to in forums. As for security, security of what?

1and1 (Ionos) is £6/month for basic hosting and you get 100GB included.

The forum up-loader is by far the most convenient method but it's limited to one forum and again the longevity of it is out of your control. Pistonheads has a integrated uploader as well, using thumbsnap?.

Using my own domain works for me as I already had it in place.

[droopsnoot]

I think one of the things that has helped make these image hosting sites popular is how easy they make it to upload and share images (apart from the free hosting, that is). I have my own web site, and with it some storage, but I generally upload to one of the hosting sites just for ease. Of course, all that would go away if I were to just spend a short amount of time either looking for, or writing, a short image handling script that would do enough.

[hurnleft]

I've more than 50,000 retro/custom car photos on here.

www.facebook.com/groups/880988652072356/?ref=group_header

Bob's British bodied Hot Rods, Customs & Interesting vehicles

I hope Facebook don't go the same way.

[vulgalour]

Facebook has much worse problems than charging a monthly subscription fee.

[HoTWire]

Nov 5, 2018 15:32:32 GMT hurnleft said:

I hope Facebook don't go the same way.

Beware, they may just randomly delete and remove photos over time, I've lost whole albums and a number of individual pictures before.



Hopefully the changes coming at Flickr improve the service. They are at least being honest and saying that 'free' tier stuff with massive storage is unsustainable. So they aren't having the pro tier people basically subsidise the free tier. Flickr is still the best photo service and they look like they are going to improve it (after a bit of a lull in quality improvement).