How "effective managers" drowned Flickr
For a ship that does not have a pier, not a single wind is passing . Seneca
A few days ago it became known that the company SmugMug, which acquired Flickr photo hosting site in April of this year, announced the cancellation of 1 TB of free disk space for users. Under the new conditions, they will have to be content with 1000 photos , the restrictions will take effect from January 2019. Holders of paid accounts will have an unlimited amount of cloud storage for the same $ 50 per year.
Just eight years ago, almost every other amateur photographer sought to share photos on Flickr . Today it is still 100 million users and a huge number of high-quality photos, equipped with geographic and semantic labels.
Flickr explains this decision by the fact that, by and large, there are no free services. The user pays for either his time or his data. Flickr, rejecting such a practice, offers a fair deal. After all, servers and electricity are not at all free.
Unfortunately, “free” services are seldom actually free for users. Users pay for their data. We would rather the arrangement be transparent ...
It would seem that in essence this is true and an overt hint at the trade in user data from large social networks is quite appropriate. However, there are arguments that highlight the ugliness of this decision.
Firstly , the restriction itself sounds pretty wild - “extra” ≥ 1001 photos from free profiles will not just be frozen, but deleted . And if someone did not change his mind and did not pay on time, he would lose his TB photos. All links and inserts in the forums and in the blog will turn into a pumpkin.
Cleaning of photos will begin, however, not immediately, but from February 5th. The automatic cleaner will begin to release the cloud storage by deleting the doomed photos, starting with the oldest by the download date. Stop cleaning at around 1000 photos.
Secondly, all this users have already passed in the last 10 years. There were severe restrictions, then even tougher, then the attraction of unprecedented generosity, and here again everything returns to normal. And here we come to the problem of "effective managers." These guys just do not know what else to come up with and just walk in circles.
Roadmap for free Flickr users.
Let us recall that users of free accounts have had since the company was acquired by Yahoo.
From 200 megabytes to 200 photos
When I started my account on Flickr in 2007, there was a limit of 200 MiB new photos per month. This framework was quite tolerant, such an honest compromise. And then "effective managers" entered the game and it started ...
Someone thought that 200 megabytes per month to upload new photos is too generous for free users and they have been cut to 200 photos for everything, about everything. Dark times have come.
Ah, these are the very limitations of the Archive .
- 300 MB monthly photo upload limit (15MB per photo)
- 2 video uploads each month (90 seconds max, 150MB per video)
- Photostream views limited to the 200 most recent images
- Group pools
- Only smaller (resized) images accessible (though you can upgrade later)
Users create content themselves, monitor quality, add to friends and share photos - the best photos, and not just selfies and feasts. Oh yeah, they also came up with a tag cloud. Flikr was a pioneer, they were equal to him.
It was necessary to invest in the community , to realize that this is much more than a simple sum of users, even if the current quarterly report is not so hot.
Dried polymers
Instead, Yahoo tried its best to catch up with the Internet search engine, which Google had already put off. Flikra team was fully loaded with the task of integrating an account with Yahoo RegID, a messaging service with Yahoo Mail and other IDB options, which the developer had “effective managers” of the parent company.
Deprived of funding and man-hours, Flickr began to lose polymers at a record pace. Already in 2008, it became clear that Facebook came in earnest and for a long time, dragging a lot of friends of almost every user. Being rather miserable as a means of storing photos at the beginning, Facebook is still far behind Flikr in this respect. However, the availability of acquaintances and friends in the network outweighed all the shortcomings with a vengeance.
The wave of mobile applications Flickr also failed to ride on time. The first mobile application appeared in September 2009 - a full year after the launch of the App Store platform! The application was terrible, it slowed down, cut off the pictures, and the loading of photos was so terrible that many people used mobile e-mail for this.
As a result, the iPhone leads in the number of photos created on Flickr, while the mobile application of the latter is not even included in the top 50 popular photo software. But there is an application with remarkable effects of laser eyes for your cat.
As we can see, the resources allocated for draconian restrictions were not directed to anything suitable.
Terabyte for free, that is for nothing
After some time, Yahoo changed its CEO and got Marissa Meyer to the fanfare at the helm.
Being a spectacular and "effective" leader, she sensibly reasoned that the restriction to 200 photos would not go far and decided to drastically change the rules of the game for Flikra users.
Instead of a measly 200 photos, free profile holders received an incredible 1 TB of cloud storage for photos and videos. I liked this innovation and again began to drag back my photos to Flickr.
Included with this generous gesture were other innovations: the new design of the site and the mobile application, the size of one photo could now be 200 megabytes.
Heyou isn’t been hitting the ground .
Although it is stated here that Flickr became relevant again for owners of both free and paid accounts, in fact, the latter were discouraged. They paid $ 50 and now have almost the same as those who did not pay a penny.
Results
Flickr entered the tailspin long before the sale to its current owner with a ridiculous name. It is safe to expect that SmugMug’s “strong business executives” will finally do Flickr, bringing the Yahoo! эффективных effective managers ’short-sighted policy to the logical end.
With no strategy to develop the best-of-its-kind photo album, Yahoo’s leadership brought Flickr to the uttermost decline by conflicting and incoherent policy changes.
If you still haven't taken the “extra” photos from Flikra, then start planning.
PS To some extent, Yandex Photos were a replacement for Flikra , but now and there it is full of seams, the service moves to Yandex Disk.