Major Flickr Update Has Absurd Free Tier
This week the folks at SmugMug announced changes to their newly-acquired service Flickr. Flickr most recently found itself owned by Yahoo, who bought the service all the way back in 2005. The sale of Flickr out from Yahoo's ownership has a lot to do with the Verizon acquisition of Yahoo, which in turn put Yahoo's many brands under their umbrella brand Oath. Oath decided Flickr was better for SmugMug, and sold Flickr to SmugMug as such. Now SmugMug's updating Flickr.
The first and most obvious change to Flickr is the axing of the Yahoo sign-in. Starting in the first month of 2019, users will no longer need to have a Yahoo account to access their Flickr account. At long, long last. Flickr is finally set free! Unless you count the other changes going down.
The folks at SmugMug run a website that's very similar to that of Flickr. As they do not want the two sites stepping on one-another's toes, changes were bound to happen to Flickr. Now those changes are about to happen.
The perks list for the Flickr Pro account now includes the following list of items as well as "more partner discounts" like Adobe Creative Cloud, gear from Peak Design, and custom portfolio sites on SmugMug. This list of perks also includes "Premiere Customer Service" which is described as: "Pros receive priority assistance from a brand new, world-class support team."
What does the Flickr Pro Account Membership include?
• Unlimited Storage of photos and videos at full resolution
• 5K Photo Display
• Video Playback is limited to 10 minutes (instead of the most recent limit of 3 minutes)
• Premiere Customer Service
• OG Pro badges (they look pretty and make you feel like you're cooler than everyone without a badge)
• Advanced Stats*
• Ad-Free Browsing
* According to SmugMug, Advanced Stats is described as such: "Users are able to see which of their photos are trending and which have performed the best. The Flickr mobile app will now give Pros all the stats they know and love in-app."
How many photos and videos can a Flickr Free account store?
The newest version of Flickr has a limit of 1,000 photos and videos. These photos and videos are not limited in size – but if you're not going to pony up some cash to the new SmugMug gods of Flickr, you're going to have a strict limit of 1k bits of media. Don't expect leniency if we get to January 2019 and you've got more than 1K photos and/or videos and you're merely a free member – get to downloading now!