Filed under: Internets
Flickr has come up in several of my recent posts, so it probably isn’t a surprise that I’m being sucked into the warm glow. The community and numerous features are really intriguing to me. RSS feeds everywhere, extensive use of tags, public API’s, starting to use AJAX instead of Flash, Creative Commons license integration, and many more nice touches make it a great product. I was just about ready to plunk down the $25 for a one year pro account. But first I started looking at the details and have decided to continue hosting my own photos using Gallery. Perhaps OurMedia.org or Google will make things a bit more competative.
My Flickr issues:
The Terms of Use are mostly benign… for now. However, they right up front say they can change the Terms at any time, in any way, with no notification. This is pretty standard these days, but I sort of expect better of Flickr. The most annoying piece of the Terms of Use for me is:
The Flickr service makes it possible to post images hosted on Flickr to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display images hosted on flickr.com must provide a link back to Flickr from each photo to its photo page on Flickr.
I would really like to take advantage of the public API to suck my pictures into my site so that people wouldn’t even necessarly know that they came from Flickr. I wouldn’t mind having a single link to flickr.com on my external page, but making every single photo link directly to the Flickr photo page is way over the top. I’m not sure I really understand their motivitation for this requirement. It they want to motiviate people to come to and use Flick, why not just require a Flickr graphic that links to Flickr.com. (Sourceforge does this.)
Another downside, is that subscription services have a way of rising prices, and when you no longer feel like paying up every year, you are left with nothing. It isn’t quite as dramatic with Flickr, but things do sort of erode over time. If you stop paying for a Pro account, your photos won’t be deleted, however, your account will become a normal free account which limits your photostream to the 200 most recent photos. Within Flickr, your older photos will effectively disappear. Also, if you don’t log-in with a free account for 90 days, the account will be completely deleted.
Then of course are Ads and the role that they’ll play in the future. Flickr states that, due to “large surges in bandwidth can be very expensive”, they reserve the right to display ads to non-members when they view your photos, “in extreme cases”. Extreme cases is undefined.
None of these issues alone are show stoppers, but I had to search over several pages to find these details and together it just feels to early to move my 12,000 photos over.
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