It’s been fun (sometimes) but I think it’s time to stop giving away my images for free, or worse, letting someone somewhere decide what they want to do with my work, and this without even letting me know…
Flickr started as a free, independent platform for file (image/video) sharing a few years ago and seemed quite a good idea – a number of web-based photographic fora didn’t allow uploading of images, so it was easier to use Flickr to stock the images and simply give a link to the image in a forum post.
Flickr has two basic modes – ‘free’, with an unlimited number of uploads, but a limited file size, or ‘pro’ where the file size is unlimited too, but costs $22/year. In terms of security, the user can limit access to his files to a list of family (‘friends’) but people rarely do this, which means that pretty much anything visible can be copied, downloaded and then used by anyone.
On April 19th 2018 Flickr was bought by the people who run SmugMug another file hosting outfit – that I’m not at all familiar with – and the current users of Flickr have until the 24th of May to copy/download/destroy the contents of their accounts if they don’t want it migrated to SmugMug.
I don’t, so I’m off – (as it happens my account renewal is on the 3rd of May, which is convenient) – and like Facebook, this will have little or no effect on me – the few people who ‘follow’ me and get regular updates when I post something won’t have the pleasure of seeing my work, but I think it’s important not to freely distribute my stuff, or at the very least, have an idea of what’s happening to it.
Like I have said on numerous occasions, if you want to know what’s going on, look at my website..
Bye