[Monte Williams]

Goodbye, Flickr
by Monte Williams, on Flickr

I never thought it would come to this, but I am leaving Flickr.

Flickr has been a ghost town for years, but still I stubbornly stuck with it and defended it after so many people dismissed it as a joke.

Well, the joke is on me.

I am not opposed to the idea of paying for my Flickr account, especially after nearly a decade of getting so much from Flickr for free.

But I am refusing nonetheless to pay for my account, for a simple reason: I can never trust Flickr again.

If Flickr had announced that only the 1,000 most recent photos on one's photostream will be accessible without a paid account, that would be one thing; it was once the case that one could only access the most recent 200 photos on one's stream, so there would be precedent. But no, they are deleting people's photos after offering free unlimited storage. How can I trust them not to pull the rug out from under us again? I don't want to pay their fee to preserve my photos only to have SmugMug decide to delete the site completely in two or three years.

I love Flickr, and I have never cared for Instagram, but I am not yet ready to give up on my hobby, and so I have reluctantly decided to pursue Instagram; even as a photo receives between 50 and 70 likes on Instagram within a few days and I know that it would only have received ten or more "Favorites" on Flickr, I still wish that I could keep using Flickr, instead.

I will miss being able to sort my photos into albums. I will miss being able to google a given photo of mine to find it quickly and easily. I will miss the ease with which I was able to share my Flickr photos on forums; I will now be leaving thousands of broken and blank images across these forums because Flickr is going to delete nearly 2,000 of my photos. (Actually, I am going to delete them myself; that way, I can choose which ones I keep).

Most of all, I will miss my Flickr friends. I hope that those of you who are not already using Instagram will consider doing so, but in the meantime I will keep my From the People You Follow page bookmarked so that I can keep up on your new photos.

To paraphrase Bret Hart, I will never forget what Flickr has taken away from me, but I will also never forget what Flickr has given to me.

https://www.instagram.com/geek_creek/