Discussion
I used to have a pro account or flickr, went to upload another set the other day and saw the ransom note.
Just priced up a Wix site, for my 5000+ photos (quantity > quality) £18 a month! f
k that!Flickr Pro it is then!
Think I'm gonna start over, as when I started back in '09 iirc, I resized all my pics (was HD even a thing back then?)
One major issue that I've noticed which is affecting content on forums such as PH is that when users jump ship from a photo hosting website, all the hot-linked images from that site disappear, in the case of Flickr it means that those pages will be marked as error 404 page not found and Google will note this when they re-index the site and most probably mark it downwards, which probably won't help the ranking of Flickr on a worldwide scale, but we don't really care about that if they are screwing users over.
In terms of PH I would think this is a right headache for the forum owners unless they bring the hosting of the images in-house, even PH may suffer if they ever have a major fall-out with Thumbsnap which is probably owned by another company, and of course PH isn't strictly speaking a photography website, but it may be something for those running the forum to consider the option of offering hosting space for users to store and publish photographs on. The problem is of course is how much to charge for this service!
It's a great shame that Flickr have gone down this route but compared to many other sites it's not that expensive, but doubling of the fees does strike me as a bit greedy, if they had moved the prices gently upwards over a period of time then perhaps they wouldn't have had a mass revolt on their hands.
I've always thought that the Flickr management decision to stop non-members from viewing the photos a bit odd, even more strange is that they have a boringly static homepage instead of having a dynamic homepage that could show continually updated user photographs, which surely is the whole purpose of the site, just imagine the number of new users that would sign up if they could actually see the millions of photos that were on there!
As a footnote, even as a mere novice I've totalled up that I have over 800 photos on there, which is quite astonishing considering that I hardly use the site let alone hot-link the images. I can imagine quite a few users have uploaded a steady stream of photographs over many years which will now be lost if they have changed or stopped using their Yahoo email address. I'm guessing that many of the older uploaded images won't even be that large in size which will be a great shame if all these photos are simply wiped from existence when they don't actually use up that much space!
In terms of PH I would think this is a right headache for the forum owners unless they bring the hosting of the images in-house, even PH may suffer if they ever have a major fall-out with Thumbsnap which is probably owned by another company, and of course PH isn't strictly speaking a photography website, but it may be something for those running the forum to consider the option of offering hosting space for users to store and publish photographs on. The problem is of course is how much to charge for this service!
It's a great shame that Flickr have gone down this route but compared to many other sites it's not that expensive, but doubling of the fees does strike me as a bit greedy, if they had moved the prices gently upwards over a period of time then perhaps they wouldn't have had a mass revolt on their hands.
I've always thought that the Flickr management decision to stop non-members from viewing the photos a bit odd, even more strange is that they have a boringly static homepage instead of having a dynamic homepage that could show continually updated user photographs, which surely is the whole purpose of the site, just imagine the number of new users that would sign up if they could actually see the millions of photos that were on there!
As a footnote, even as a mere novice I've totalled up that I have over 800 photos on there, which is quite astonishing considering that I hardly use the site let alone hot-link the images. I can imagine quite a few users have uploaded a steady stream of photographs over many years which will now be lost if they have changed or stopped using their Yahoo email address. I'm guessing that many of the older uploaded images won't even be that large in size which will be a great shame if all these photos are simply wiped from existence when they don't actually use up that much space!
rich888 said:
As a footnote, even as a mere novice I've totalled up that I have over 800 photos on there, which is quite astonishing considering that I hardly use the site let alone hot-link the images. I can imagine quite a few users have uploaded a steady stream of photographs over many years which will now be lost if they have changed or stopped using their Yahoo email address. I'm guessing that many of the older uploaded images won't even be that large in size which will be a great shame if all these photos are simply wiped from existence when they don't actually use up that much space!
It isn't just pretty photos either - there are many archives of interesting things like historic photos of local areas, or the chap who scanned all the old Autocar reviews etc.I suppose it depends on what you see Flickr as. Historically, it was always a community. A lot of people on this thread are describing it as a photo hosting site which certainly wasn't the historic intention (in fact, it was always quite tiresome to link to a photo but admittedly this has improved over the years).
It's not Photobucket or Thumbsnap.
Ref the loss of interesting / valuable archive-type stuff, someone has always had to pay to host these things. Back in the day, it was a geek who had spent money on a server and an ISDN line. Then it was someone with a cPanel virtual server. Then a cloud storage service. All of which cost money somewhere along the line. Whether the bill was footed by an individual, or a business, or an institution, there was a cost.
Now, for people (like me) who aren't really in it for the community, and pay for cloud storage elsewhere (e.g. Google) it becomes a choice of whether to have *another* paid-for solution, rather than having *a* paid for solution.
It's not Photobucket or Thumbsnap.
Ref the loss of interesting / valuable archive-type stuff, someone has always had to pay to host these things. Back in the day, it was a geek who had spent money on a server and an ISDN line. Then it was someone with a cPanel virtual server. Then a cloud storage service. All of which cost money somewhere along the line. Whether the bill was footed by an individual, or a business, or an institution, there was a cost.
Now, for people (like me) who aren't really in it for the community, and pay for cloud storage elsewhere (e.g. Google) it becomes a choice of whether to have *another* paid-for solution, rather than having *a* paid for solution.
Clockwork Cupcake said:
I'm looking to migrate some of my photos to a self-hosted gallery, since I already pay for web hosting and have spare capacity.
I've used Gallery3 and Coppermine in the past, but both look pretty naff tbh - they look dated, they're clunky, and they are a pest to maintain and organise photos in.
Lychee looks quite interesting, as does Piwigo. I might have a play with them.
Update: Lychee is a little too basic. But Piwigo shows promise, and there is even a Flickr2Piwigo plugin that uses the Flickr API to import all photos from your Flickr account to Piwigo.
Update2: Flickr2Piwigo brought over 1139/1142 photos, and all metadata including upload time and keywords, and created corresponding albums that mirrored the Flickr ones. The only deficiency is that for some reason it didn't bring over the album descriptions. But apart from that (and the 3 files which failed to transfer) it did a pretty good job of migrating a Flickr account. Obviously user comments, faves, and view counts don't come over.
Note: Albums come over flat. If you use Flickr's Collections to effectively create a hierarchy of albums, then this doesn't come across. But once in Piwigo, you can make albums sub-albums of other albums.
I think this has swung me in favour of giving Piwigo a go. I have hosting that i pay for anyway, but it is way under utilised. Have been looking over the last few days at other software options to install and manage photos online - the Flickr3Piwigo plugin sounds like an ideal solution I've used Gallery3 and Coppermine in the past, but both look pretty naff tbh - they look dated, they're clunky, and they are a pest to maintain and organise photos in.
Lychee looks quite interesting, as does Piwigo. I might have a play with them.
Update: Lychee is a little too basic. But Piwigo shows promise, and there is even a Flickr2Piwigo plugin that uses the Flickr API to import all photos from your Flickr account to Piwigo.
Update2: Flickr2Piwigo brought over 1139/1142 photos, and all metadata including upload time and keywords, and created corresponding albums that mirrored the Flickr ones. The only deficiency is that for some reason it didn't bring over the album descriptions. But apart from that (and the 3 files which failed to transfer) it did a pretty good job of migrating a Flickr account. Obviously user comments, faves, and view counts don't come over.
Note: Albums come over flat. If you use Flickr's Collections to effectively create a hierarchy of albums, then this doesn't come across. But once in Piwigo, you can make albums sub-albums of other albums.
Edited by Clockwork Cupcake on Saturday 3rd November 19:19
Crasher242 said:
I think this has swung me in favour of giving Piwigo a go. I have hosting that i pay for anyway, but it is way under utilised. Have been looking over the last few days at other software options to install and manage photos online - the Flickr3Piwigo plugin sounds like an ideal solution
I've been very impressed with Piwigo, and am pretty happy with what I ended up with. I even got the missed 3 files to come across - I logged out of Flickr2Piwigo, logged back in again (which re-creates the Flickr API connection) and retried. Once in Piwigo, the album organisation is pretty good and I was able to reorganise sub-albums very quickly.
There are plenty of plugins for Piwigo. A couple caused PHP errors due to the version of PHP 5.x on my virtual server being too old but fortunately my virtual host allows me to change the version of PHP via the control panel so I just bumped it up a few versions (still within 5.x), and all was well.
Just noticed the detail of this (yes, I should pay more attention to email...)
I’m disappointed Flickr has taken their approach.
Their reasons mention giving users “a staggering terabyte of storage”. So why not limit it to 1,000 pics or 50-100GB, whichever is lower?
Turns out I have 9,200pics, but taking less than 25GB!
The amount isn’t life changing, but their approach leaves a bad taste in the mouth, & I don’t like being “blackmailed” in that way.
I’m disappointed Flickr has taken their approach.
Their reasons mention giving users “a staggering terabyte of storage”. So why not limit it to 1,000 pics or 50-100GB, whichever is lower?
Turns out I have 9,200pics, but taking less than 25GB!
The amount isn’t life changing, but their approach leaves a bad taste in the mouth, & I don’t like being “blackmailed” in that way.
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