Flickr's Future for Me

Well, I've been with Flickr since 2008.  From day one, I've been a Pro user.  With the Pro account, I didn't have any limit as to the number or size of images that I upload.  That was nice, and I've used up about 250GB of disk space so far.  I also liked the stats page (back when you could get more information from your visitors such as what country they're connected in from) but the stats page has changed.  I get very limited information, or perhaps I don't know how to use the new stats page.  Besides those things that I do on Flickr, it's just an image repository for me.  It could also serve as backup storage in case my place burns down.

As most users already know, Yahoo's Flickr was purchased by SmugMug back in the summer of 2018.  Shortly after, prices went up, not just by an unnoticeable trickle but by a large doubling of the numbers!  It's about $50 USD for one year when it used to be just $25 USD.  At $25 USD I didn't mind spending it because I figure in 20 years, that would amount to only $500 and I thought Flickr would still be making money as the price of hard drive keeps dropping every year.  That was a good win-win situation I thought.  Now, for some reason, when they doubled the price, now all of a sudden, it seems so much more expensive at $1000!  The triple digit cost puts it in a new perspective.  I don't feel like spending that much money for an image repository anymore, especially when I have my own server at home that can host my images.  Truthfully though, $1000 is still pretty good.  With my own hardware, I'd still have to spend money for upgrades.  I'm sure I wouldn't have to spend $1000 USD over the next 20 years but it's a bit more work on my end.  I don't mind that.

So, after over 10 years, I've decided to quit.  I'm still going to use the free version of Flickr once in a while but mostly, I'll just be hosting my own images on my server.