[PHOTO] On the alleged Flickr crisis

[rfmcdonald]

I'm a heavy user of Flickr, my account hosting no fewer than 4,827 photos as of this moment. For just over a decade, it has been a site that has worked quite well for me. Then, yesterday, I saw this Wired article appear on my feed.

Just shy of a year ago, Flickr started offering 1,000 gigs of free storage to every user, along with an automatic uploader tool that would help you take every photo from your computer, your external drives, and SD cards, and dump them into one place. Flickr’s search engine was good, the new universal Camera Roll interface was great, and Flickr suddenly seemed to have a chance as a permanent archive of all of our photos. But then, this morning, Flickr announced that once again its best tools will only be available to paying users. It’s time to call it: Flickr is dead. Over. Kaput. In the search for a few more people willing to fork over $35 a year to fund more purple offices, Yahoo has killed its photo service.

Today’s announcements really only include one change of consequence: The desktop Auto-Uploadr tool is now reserved only for Pro users. That means there’s no easy way to upload big batches of photos all at once, into the same place, unless you’re a Pro member. The move feels a bit like ransomware, Yahoo forcing people who’ve already bought into the idea of Flickr as a permanent backup to start paying for the privilege. And it kills the notion that Flickr can be a useful, simple, automatic way to keep all your photos backed up in one place.

The Next Web's Amanda Connolly was not the only person to see this as cause to switch to Google Photos.

Where to go next? Well, I had always championed Flickr above Google Photos because of its ease of use, Magic View and search functionalities but now the latter seems like the next best option.

My colleague, Owen Williams, has said he is “totally and irrationally in love with Google Photos,” so now is definitely the right time to check it out.

Google Photos offers everything you can get from Flickr and it’s free, so that’s a bonus. It also has some quirky features, like automatically making GIFs from your images, as well as slideshows set to music from groups of photos around specific events, like New Year’s Eve or weddings.

Its search function is up to scratch as well, allowing you to search for pretty much anything, like ‘dogs’ or ‘beach’ and providing you with accurate results. There’s one caveat though, Google Photos only offers facial recognition in the US yet, so you’ll need to use a VPN to enable that right now. It is something that I’d expect to see rolled out globally in the near future.

Wired's Molly McHugh went on to explain to people how to offload their photos from Flickr to whatever destination.

I'm not sure what to think about all this anger. Yes, it probably is a good idea to create an online backup of my Flickr account. I may do that tonight. From my perspective, Auto-Uploadr was a hindrance, a feature that I could not turn off on my smartphone but instead just automatically uploaded even my rawest and worst photos to Flickr. It, in fact, is the reason I never used the Flickr app. So long as I can continue to upload my photos with a touch of a screen, and download them at will with their meta data intact, I really don't see a problem.

What am I missing?