DIGITAL LIFE

Flickr removes the terabyte of free space

Flickr will remove its terabyte of storage in free accounts soon, with a new limit of 1,000 photos. With slightly more than two months of margin, will be from January 8, 2019 when this change takes effect. The vice president of product at the company has written an article to explain the reasons for this change, which is not the only one.Flickr was owned by Yahoo - which in turn was owned by Verizon since its sale in 2016 - until it was handed to SmugMug, a video and image hosting service, last April.

Cutting expenses, increasing income and recovering the community
After more than five years with 1TB capacity in free accounts, this limit will drastically reduce to 1,000 photos. And that does not seem to affect the vast majority of users of the service. According to company data, 97% of accounts have less than this number and an "overwhelming majority" of Pro accounts surpass it.Since Flickr claim that the free terabyte offer attracted a large number of users for free space, and not for the community, which ultimately detracted. They do not hide, accepting that the new limitation will allow to focus the site on its subscribers, making it less dependent on advertising:"And because storing tens of billions of photos of Flickr members is astonishingly expensive, we need our more active members to help us continue to invest in Flickr's stability, growth and innovation."

New login for all and new for Pro

Flickr accompanies this announcement with more changes, starting with a new login system outside of Yahoo, which became mandatory during 2014. Now the web will have its own access via email. It will be available from January 2019 and will do so with a two-step authentication system.To attract users of free accounts to Pro accounts, there are specific news to these and have been announced by the CEO of SmugMug:Larger formats to support screens up to 5K, up to 26 MPColor profiles such as AdobeRGB or ProPhoto supportedFaster system for new photos, progressively including the entire catalog, in AWS.


H. T.