It’s the Dropbox rip-off all over again!

I’ve just been reminded today that my picture albums are about to be taken hostage. Not long after Yahoo had sold Flickr to SmugMug, they announced drastic changes in their policy. Their offering was too good and not profitable enough so they decided to jack up their price and radically reduce the advantages of free accounts. By doing so they are seriously screwing up their existing customers in what amounts to nothing less than corporate highway robbery!

The free accounts will be reduced to 1,000 photos and videos (instead of 1 Tb). Customers can update to Flickr Pro to have unlimited storage for C$65.88 (C$5.49 / mo) in a scheme that is basically upgrade or die! We have until January 8th to decide, after that our accounts will be frozen until February 5th, when the excess pictures will be DELETED! That’s outrageous!

This puts me in quite a dilemma. Since it has been one of the best sharing photos sites, I’ve been using the Flickr free account a lot for a while—although I’ve almost stopped using it since I upgraded to MacOS Mojave because the Photos app doesn’t allow us to easily upload to Flickr anymore. However, I still have 57 photo albums on it, which contains over 3000 pictures (0.6% of 1 Tb). 

So, should I upgrade or not? If I don’t I will lose my albums—but it doesn’t really matter since all those pictures are still in my Photos libraries anyway. It is just that there, I cannot share those pictures. And I don’t really want to pay yet another subscription service (I am already paying for several of them) and I am already using other services that could serve as Flickr alternative — although not as good… What are the photo sharing options that I already have?

• Adobe Portfolio — included with my Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan (US$137.83 for 20 Gb, Photoshop, Lightroom) but seems to double the use of WordPress. Although the whole Adobe Creative Cloud offers A LOT of potential that I still have to explore…
• Amazon Photo — unlimited photo storage (plus 5 Gb for video and files) already included with my Amazon Prime subscription (C$79), but you can share only links and is not web-based like Flickr was… (Ex.: Cats 2017-18) 
• Dropbox — free (using 37% of 6.8 Gb) but not able to easily share files anymore (unless I pay C$129 for 1 Tb or C$279 for 2 Tb & Showcase)
• Facebook — free, but not very practical (any limits?)
• Google Photo — free (using 6.3% of 15 Gb) but not practical because you can share only links (ex: Blogger album or Flower 2018 [from Flickr])
• iCloud — I am already paying $3.99 for 200 Gb (so far using only 40%) to host my pictures, but there’s no real option to share pictures or albums…
• Imgur — free, no limit (sounds great! But doesn’t look very elegant)
• Instagram — free & cute, but again not very practical for photo albums
• Photobucket — free, slow, offers only 2.5 Gb (2% used) with very intrusive ads (or pay $48.36 for 25 Gb)
• Pinterest — free, but not very practical for photo albums (good to pins pics from other sites though)
• Vimeo — 250 Gb included with my Plus subscription ($108), but it’s for video only and would be superfluous and redundant if I go with WordPress Premium…
• WordPress — included with my Personal hosting ($48) I already have 6 Gb (using only 48%), but I am considering upgrading to Premium for 13 Gb ($96 but it also includes advanced social media, simple payments, site monetization and video support), but no nice way to share large albums. But I am sure I could work out something… (there are widgets for Gallery or Instagram)

After testing (again) all those alternatives (wasting an entire afternoon of writing doing so) I sadly report that none of them seems totally satisfactory. However, I refuse to pay the ransom that Flicker is asking for my picture albums… F*ck you Flickr !

I’ll probably workout something on WordPress, either directly or create a page that forward to a subsidiary site (Amazon, Google or Imgur) through links… We’ll see.

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