Flickr Photos

Recently, i was sourcing for a photo sharing site and finally decided to settle for Flickr. Flickr is owned by Yahoo. Yahoo's existing Photos site would be shut down by September 2007. And any existing photo account, if not transferred to other photo sharing sites like Photo bucket etc, by then would be deleted.

I did have an Yahoo Photo account and found it to be extremely useful. However, as it was in the midst of being phased out, i got no choice but to use another photo site.

Frankly, it was not easy to look for a reliable photo sharing site. My requirements was that they should allow photos of a decent size (above 1 mega pixel each) , have enough mega memory storage space and can be accessed via albums.

I have fallen prey to 2 other photo sharing sites. One is esnips, which i sometimes could not access after a few months. Another is YouRep, a beta site and also one of Time magazine Top 10 websites of 2006. YouRep has totally disappeared! Who knows what happen? Maybe they ran out of funding or their organisation collapsed or whatever?

I do like Photo Bucket, but photo bucket is more for sharing photos. It is usefully if one intend to view the photos one by one. But then if one desire to view photos album by album, then Photo Bucket is not that suitable.

Another site I had used is Picasa Photos by Google. However, Picasa free account only has 1024 Mb memory space. Their pro account for US$25 annually comes with only 7Gb of memory space. So currently, yeah, i am using Picasa as a sort of backup photo site.

Anyway, i was happily uploading my pics to Flickr when i came across their first limitation, which i was unaware when i sighed up. That is, for a free account, i can only create up to 3 sets of batches. 1 batch set of photos is like a set of photo album. Without the ability to create more than 3 sets to organise the photos, all the photos would be lumped together into one main gallery.

And then i came across the 2nd limitation! That is Flickr would only show up to 200 recent photos uploaded. Any photos beyond 200 would be hidden from view until the account is upgraded to that of a pro account. (see message from Flickr below)

With a free account, I was to be able to upload up to 100Mb worth of photos each calendar month. But then this 100 Mb is bandwidth, not the amount of storage space on Flickr servers. So far, i have just exceeded 200 photos and 60% of my monthly quota!

Bumper! Well, frankly, i did not read any of these limitations when i signed up, especially the only 200 photos shown part. Maybe I had inadvertently skipped that section, or that i had missed the small fine print. If i had known, i would probably try to look for a better photo sharing site.

Hey, I am not a cheap skate. US$24.95 seems a good deal for unlimited storage, unlimited size and unlimited sets. That work out to be about US$2 per month. But the thing here is I am slightly pissed off about the 200 photos part.

Another option i could take is that i could always sign up for another Flickr free account. That means another 200 photos online storage. But I have thousands and thousands of photos! How many free accounts can i sign up?

Sigh!

I have recently organised my photos and wanted to put them online. So i suppose i should sign up for their pro account. But frankly, to me, this felt like something of a threat? I felt it's like Flickr held part of my photos hostage until i sign up for a pro account.

The threat part comes from the wording "come back unharmed". If this is someone sense of perverted humor, frankly, i dun find it that funny.

Come on! In this time and age, 200 photos for a free account is too damn low! I took more than 300 photos at one setting!

Well, nothing is for free. Some things are free up to a certain limit...and then they start charging! Bandwidth is not free, so is storage space and manpower!

But damn, some how, i felt that i have been screwed over!

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Hey i wicked! About your photos...

You've run into one of the limits of a free account. Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you've uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account.

None of your photos have been deleted, and if you upgrade, they'll all come back unharmed.