“ But we’ve been lax in truly defining a space for these photographers, until now.” “Photographers who craft and create work that might be considered risqué by some will have a safe place online to interact with one another, share mutual interests, and put their art into the world without the fear of it being removed or them being banned entirely from the communities they love,” Head of Flickr Alex Seville wrote in a blog post. But it’s still not making money, hence the pivot to inviting NSFW uploads. So far, Flickr said it hasn’t actually deleted any uploads (thank you, Flickr, but also, this means I wasted an afternoon in 2019 downloading zip files of everything I ever posted). These major changes were implemented to encourage users to save their personal archives by upgrading to a paid plan. Flickr also warned users that after a certain date, their photos could be deleted. But under SmugMug’s management, Flickr instituted a limit on how many photos free users could store, knocking down that terabyte of data to just 1,000 photos. For a while, there wasn’t much of a reason to pay for Flickr, since all users had a free terabyte of storage for their photos. It would be sad if that were all to disappear.īut Flickr is very expensive to run because it hosts so much data on the internet. For one thing, it showcases actual historical images, but it also chronicles a visual history of the world through the lens of millions of people since 2004. When SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting service in 2018, CEO Don MacAskill hoped to make the service profitable, calling it “ core to the entire fabric of the Internet.” But this wasn’t just hyperbolic CEO-speak - MacAskill had a point. Honestly, it’s not a bad move - it might be more effective than asking subscribers to recruit their friends to pay for Flickr. So, in an attempt to draw in more paying subscribers, Flickr changed its content guidelines to only allow Flickr Pro users to post “restricted” or “moderate” content, which includes photos of “full-frontal nudity and sexual acts.” Flickr isn’t very good at making money, but as the old adage goes, sex sells.

My flickr photos