Tasteful nudity and other friskier sorts of photography will remain welcome at Flickr, but only paying members will be able to share such images.
The SmugMug-owned photo-sharing site announced the change in a post on Wednesday by Flickr head Alex Seville. He also revealed another upcoming limit: Free accounts, already capped at 1,000 photos, will only be able to mark 50 of them as non-public. The post didn’t say when these changes will go live, so we asked SmugMug for clarification and will update this post if and when they provide it.
Seville explained that these changes would let the service “preserve and encourage the inspiring public photos free members contribute to Flickr, while also freeing up resources to focus on making our Pro communities stronger than ever.”
Both changes deepen SmugMug’s emphasis on Pro memberships, which run $8.25 a month, $71.99 a year, or $132.99 for two years for unlimited storage and ad-free usage.
Privately-held, Mountain View, Calif.-based SmugMug bought Flickr from Yahoo in April 2018 for an undisclosed price, ending years of erratic stewardship that veered from neglect of the property Yahoo had bought in 2005 to an ultimately unsustainable offer in 2013 of 1 terabyte of free storage. Under SmugMug, Flickr has dropped the 1TB freebie and raised Pro rates from $50/year. At the end of 2019, CEO Don MacAskill implored free users to sign up for Pro to keep the service going.
Other photo-sharing services have experienced their own issues lately. Last June, Google Photos ended free unlimited storage, leaving users with a 15GB cap across their entire Google account.
Facebook-owned Instagram (which bans NSFW content) has drawn criticism for an algorithmic feed that can encourage overuse and inflict body-image anxiety on teenage girls, plus product changes that seem driven by its corporate parent’s desire to crush rival social networks–for instance, the August 2020 addition of TikTok-esque Reels video clips.
Flickr may seem like a photo-sharing fossil next to those two services and ranks far below them in app downloads. However, Flickr remains a rare social network that isn’t the property of a giant tech firm, while its Creative Commons licensing support and its community developed in topic-specific groups (for instance, “Greater and Lesser Washington” and “EAT Signs”) continue to go unmatched at its larger rivals.
Disclosure: I’m a Flickr userFlickr user and have paid for Pro membership since 2011.
