Flickr's not a backup service, and from the quoted TOS:
> Your photos are not removed from Flickr, only from the list of your photos.
Right. You can't browse your old photos. Links to those photos work, but your list no longer contains them.
Web 2.0 really has spoiled people. If I stop paying AT&T, they cut my iPhone service. If I stop paying for Basecamp, they cut my number of active projects (presumably, haven't checked the actual consequence.)
But if you stop paying for Flickr, they still let you use up all the drive space and bandwidth you want, they just limit the number of photos they list on your account page. This somehow isn't good enough for some folks.
Their terms -- keeping your data around forever, just inaccessible to you, as long as you log in once every 90 days -- is actually pretty nice for a backup perspective.
You could conceivably get a Pro account, upload tons of stuff, then let it lapse, logging in periodically to keep it active, and only paying the $25 to upgrade again if you need to recover something.
I doubt this is what they have in mind, which is why I don't think for a minute that they ever seriously sold Flickr as a backup service. But you could do it.
I wasn't a fan of Yahoo's takeover of Flickr (I would have much preferred Google, and Yahoo could have taken that pit of dreck called YouTube), but they have managed to keep their hands off of it for the most part since then. I'm pretty sure that the current business model predates the buyout, or at the least has been around for several years now.
I don't get the preference for Yahoo as an acquirer over Google. Yahoo has repeatedly killed internal projects in favor of acquisitions - Google, for better or worse, has a substantial NIH mentality. Sure, Flickr and Delicious haven't really innovated since acquisition, but Yahoo's at least let them stay more-or-less intact (less charitably, Yahoo's let them stagnate).
I had the same experience as this guy. The problem is I couldn't figure out how to recover my photos without paying, not even with FlickrDown. That somehow seems wrong to me. Hide all but 200 photos if necessary. Don't let me upload more. But don't make me pay a ransom to get at them privately.
After I paid that ransom? I too moved all my photos to Picasa. Even better that it's a smoother integration with my desktop experience.
But when you do want to use it as a backup, isn't picasa rather expensive? You get 1GB for free, but that's just enough for uploading smaller version of your photos. Otherwise, the price is rather high, and what's worse, you pay for disk space...so as your collection grows, you will end up paying more and more.
I also use Picasaweb, but just for sharing a few resized photos with my friends.
If we talk about photo backup, is there something better than Flickr? My collection is around 25GB, and grows about 5-10 GB per year.
Good point. I just swap out albums as necessary with Picasa desktop. But for your use case I know I'd love to hear alternatives to Flickr.
Doesn't his (and my) complaint still stand though? There are surely other ways of throttling use besides holding data for ransom. Limit to 200 public views and prevent new uploads, for instance.
I think it's more that Web 2.0 has allowed the spoiled people to broadcast their juvenile "Fuck Yahoo!" to the general(er) population.
That said, the funny thing about Flickr is that they really don't send you a notification when your subscription runs out. The same thing happened to me (so I logged in and renewed my subscription - which surprisingly turned out more effective than blogging about it.)
> The wording of that FAQ was almost identical back in Feb 2005
Which, for those who, like me, don't have instant recall of web 2.0 takeovers, is a month before Yahoo! acquired Flickr. Yahoo! may have "completely ruined Flickr", but this issue isn't a casualty.
Flickr is an amazing service - as insane as it sounds, for $25 a year they offer:
* Unlimited storage
* Unlimited bandwidth
It used to be that Pro accounts only allowed 2GB of uploads a month. Sure, there are limits on the size of each upload, but for a photographer, this is insanely great. Also the developers over there are embracing all sorts of cool things like machine-tags and their API is top notch.
Complain about Flickr all you want, but if their service keeps being this awesome, I'm going to keep giving them the little they ask for.
So... I am company A that provides a service to you, for free. The service I provide is useful to you. I will always keep the stuff you upload to my service. Since lots of people also like the service that I provide, and because the nature of my service is expensive to maintain for all of the people who use it, I need to make some revenue from my service in order to maintain it. I will always keep your stuff for you, and if you use it a little bit its completely free. But if you really, really like to use my service, I just ask that you pay me a little bit of money since you are getting value out of it. In the event that you forget to pay me, I will still keep your stuff but you'll only have limited access to the service. When, or if, you want to use the service full time again, just continue paying me a little bit of money.
> Your photos are not removed from Flickr, only from the list of your photos.
Right. You can't browse your old photos. Links to those photos work, but your list no longer contains them.
Web 2.0 really has spoiled people. If I stop paying AT&T, they cut my iPhone service. If I stop paying for Basecamp, they cut my number of active projects (presumably, haven't checked the actual consequence.)
But if you stop paying for Flickr, they still let you use up all the drive space and bandwidth you want, they just limit the number of photos they list on your account page. This somehow isn't good enough for some folks.