Tekforums
Chat => Photography => Topic started by: Russell on May 20, 2013, 22:45:26 PM
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Has gone and changed itself a bit, they've offered a few new things like a terrabyte of space and a few other things but they've done away with the pro account and instead replaced it with an ad-free account for the not so cheap sum of $49.99. Still trying to work out whats gone on but heres a starter:
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2013/05/20/a-better-brighter-flickr/
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Will have to look at this tomorrow. The stuff about the free features sounds good, but for more money a year they had better offer more for the revised pro account. EG, unlimited storage (wasn't the old pro account unlimited?)
It'd be nice if they've added options for selling or linking to other sites for the paid version too, as opposed to making it against ToS.
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Looks like flickr has increased free functionality by getting the paid option to foot the bill with increased fees, whilst reducing the perks from the paid option.
Flickr may well have lost $30 a year from me unless the ads are annoying to me or viewers of my photos.
If I'm at my 1tb limit (possible) I may well end up moving back to zenfolio as no way am I paying $500 for 2tb.
Either way this is a bad move I think, I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.
They really need to rethink their pricing. $50 a year just to remove ads is too much. If $100 a year is ad free and unlimited elsewhere I'll gladly pay it. It's just a shame as it'll impact the searchability of my photos.
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While I can understand the ease of use and instant appeal of it, for $50 a year I'd be hosting my own website.
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http://mashable.com/2013/05/20/flickr-pro-changes/
Apparently the pro accounts are not available to buy now, but if you are an exists pro member there are no plans to force you across to the new style accounts and you should be able to keep your account, including renewing it as a pro account.
Sounds good except now I'll always have in the back of my head that they could and likely will force pro accounts across at some point.
My reason for concern is that I have a lot of creative Commons licensed entomological and scientific photos up at stupid resolutions. I don't want to have to limit my account as I don't want to stop people having access to these photos for use in science etc.
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A bit happier now that I can continue to pay for my pro account, there aren't really any benefits for me going to the new 'ad-free' account which is good as it seems a bit of a rip off really. I can't see them doing the pro account forever though, once the uproar from this dies down they'll be forcing you onto the $49.99 account.
Doesn't sound like its the type of change you want zypder, problem is there aren't really the alternatives. Tried 500px earlier this year but don't really like it if your photo doesn't make it past fresh when you upload it then there's basically no way of getting it any more views. Obviously the better the picture the more its likely to get seen but you can upload it at the wrong time and your done for.
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I'm not so fussed about "community views" as I am about search engine optimisation, an the API integration into other websites and projects. It does seem flickr is rather good, especially with things like the obscure latin names of beetles, at getting top page results on google. I don't really put my photos in groups that much, and rely on people looking up species etc to find the photos through flickr or google.
Even though my microphoto.co.uk website is fully sitemapped, and submitted to the different search engines, it ranks rather poorly on results. The same photos are on flickr and microphoto, and I'd say on average I get 100+ views a day of the beetles on flickr, and < 5 a day on microphoto (unless google analytics is under reporting). (I used to get a bit more when it was on Drupal, I probably hinder the rankings by redesigning the site every year)
I do find it a bit unsettling flickrs use of the word "currently" in the FAQ's, that "Pro account users can currently continue to use their pro accounts".
I think the logical thing for me to do, when that day comes, is to find a flickr downloader, download ALL my photos to a portable HDD, and make a macro/action in photoshop to go through all my photos and resize and compress all photos over 5mb. Then reupload/change those on flickr. So long as the ads aren't too in your face and aren't like watermarks on the photos, I'll stay on the free account.
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I got the impression that as soon as your pro account expires that's it, there's no renewing and you are then stuck with the free or can buy one of the new accounts.
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If you really want your microphoto website to push higher in SEO rankings you should look into installing a rich snippets/microdata/rdfa module if one is available, this will allow you to post extensive meta data alongside your photos that Google can use and display in search results. This is a massive thing now in SEO.
Having a look at your site the biggest problem is there is zero content beyond the order/genus descriptions. If you had descriptions and opened it up socially it would easily rank more favourably.
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Yeah.
I've considered adding a load of stuff like common names, habitats etc. It should be easy to lift a lot of the information from existing sources. It's just finding the time to do it all :D
I think the drupal site had more visitors due to this too. It was a lot more manually done, including a lot more descriptive text on each species page.as to RDFA modules, I have absolutely no idea what those are, but will look into it.
Currently my mission is to just finish photographing the collections here at uni, before I move jobs etc. I'm probably only 50% in!
I got the impression that as soon as your pro account expires that's it, there's no renewing and you are then stuck with the free or can buy one of the new accounts.
See this thread:
https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633549571752/#reply72157633549635930
So, if your account will auto renew on a set date, you should be *safe*...for now.
If it expires on a set date, you're going to have a bad time and get switched to the new free account.
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Oh right, mines not set to auto renew but then I wont really miss anything when I get switched to a free account now.
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Oh right, mines not set to auto renew but then I wont really miss anything when I get switched to a free account now.
I'd check it, mine wasn't set to auto renew before now but I've just checked and it says I'll auto renew in July.
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Same. I just used to pay for 2 years at a time. Seems its set to autorenew now.
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It seems that they turned on auto renewals from something like Jan 2012, so if you paid for pro since then you would auto renew and you could keep your pro account. If you've been buying 2 year subs and renewed before Jan 2012 then your account didn't turn the auto renewals on and you'd get dumped back to a free account. Or at least that's what it looked like, seems there's been such an outcry over the change that they're set every pro account to auto renew which makes the entire change in pricing a waste of time for existing customers, I can't see anyone who has a pro account stopping it unless they're leaving the site or giving up photography it'll only affect new signups.
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Supposedly Pro accounts made up only a small amount of the flickr user base. Which I don't get as pretty much every profile I ever looked at had a pro tag on it.
I guess they're hoping the existing pro accounts will stick around if kept happy with old pricing, in the process keeping flickr alive long enough for the new swanky design layout to entice new users in, who will then prop up the service with overpriced accounts maybe.
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seems there's been such an outcry over the change that they're set every pro account to auto renew
Got a link to any release from flickr about that?
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seems there's been such an outcry over the change that they're set every pro account to auto renew
Got a link to any release from flickr about that?
I haven't, well not on my PC at work posted that from home last night. There was an article on somewhere like Cnet I think plus quite a bit on the flickr support forums and twitter.
After using it a bit more the biggest annoyances I've found with it are its slower but not too bad, the location map for photos isn't as easy to get to so I think people aren't geotagging their photos as much and the contacts photos on the landing page when your logged in is far too in your face. Other than those few things it doesn't seem too bad really just a layout change for the most.
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I agree with that pretty much.
Another thing I've noticed is in the groups pages, it switches from the new design back to the older design. Not sure if it's some weird cache issue, or actually meant to be like that. Either way, the lack of consistency adds to the confusion!
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http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633547442506
That's the flickr forum thread for everything, its up to 177 pages, mainly of people who feel they've been ripped off as they've not got an auto-renewing pro account.
Since I can't see the ads I tried looking at flickr through IE since I'm not signed in on there, went to the explore page and it took a while to load up so left it and forgot about it in the background, about 10 minutes ago my PC popped up saying I was running low on memory checked task manager and that IE window was using just over 4gb of memory! Well done on the remake flickr/yahoo!
I agree with that pretty much.
Another thing I've noticed is in the groups pages, it switches from the new design back to the older design. Not sure if it's some weird cache issue, or actually meant to be like that. Either way, the lack of consistency adds to the confusion!
Does seem to be some pages that are basically the same as the old system, its as if they've done half a job hopefully its only temporary or down to caching but does stink of them wanting to get the redesign out before its done.
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I've only just noticed if you hover over your icon in the top right on Flickr it'll tell you how much space you are using.
I'm using 0.036tb of unlimited apparently. I'm surprised at how little that is. I don't know whether it's a calculation glitch due to being "unlimited" or whether flickr compresses pictures when you upload them. Certainly today I uploaded 74 pictures totalling about 300mb, so that "0.036tb" should at least be double that now as it was set to that before I uploaded!
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0.036tb isnt that 36 gigs? so your 300 megs won't have touched it.
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Yeah 36gigs sounds alot more like it especially for the shed load of photos you've got on there!
Just checked mine and I'm using 0.0022tb so 2.5gb on 250 photos or somewhere about that anyway.
New challenge for anyone, get to 0.1tb, think we might be on a while lol
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D'oh! It is indeed.
Though I still think 36gb is mighty small. It works out less than 1mb a photo. Given that I know the last 2000 photos uploaded were all probably at least 3mb in size, I'd have said it should be at least 90gb!
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Maybe they utilise compression on their end?
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I thought jpgs were pretty well compressed anyway?
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Depends on the settings. Plus different compression algorithms yield different sizes.
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They must reduce the quality of the JPEGs substantially then if that's the case.
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I've always suspected they tweak the photos somehow, as sometimes images seem to have a bit more punch than in Adobe bridge/windows.
They won't be using some kind of compression that allows them to compress stored images but display them in original form? I've just checked, and a 15mb file I uploaded today downloaded from flickr at the same size, so the "original" hasn't been lost?!
Or could it be that there's some policy of old photos being compressed down and reduced in size?
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Maybe its something akin to "disk compression" in NTFS. No idea how their storing the images and there are lots of dark arts for compression systems.
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I play around a lot with compression, even LZMA2 at the highest level won't compress JPGs or video very much at all (we're talking a few MBs over GBs of data) and that is very resource intensive, they certainly won't be doing anything that complex with the images server-side. They must just have an awful lot of cloud space!