Recently I popped onto Flickr to grab an image from my old and semi-abandoned Flickr account. And, um, I couldn't find it in the original size, only resized to smaller. So I looked around and found this answer in the FAQ:
"If you have a free account, no one (including you) can access your original file."
WHAT?
Did Yahoo go completely nuts? Are they totally retarded AND insane at the same time? What in the world made them think it's a good idea to run a photo sharing site in a way where I can't download an image I myself have uploaded to them??
Haha - how ironic! I'm afraid though this is just a taste of the future on the Net.
We will have to start redning the fine print in the terms of use
of every such service carefully in the near future.
Buy yourself your own domain name, and make your own website. You will keep total control over your own content. Do this and sooner or later you will be glad. You will make your own terms of use, and not be beholden to anyone else.
It is probably a minor annoyance, but it also seems a bit odd to angrily insist that a company provide you with free storage and the ability to serve out versions of your photo for free as well.
It seems that you regard the ability to access the file for yourself and so the you can embed it elsewhere has value - otherwise you would care about this if the value was small. Yet you aren't interested in paying anything for this thing of value.
The cost of a Flickr membership, if I recall correctly, is about $25/year... or $2 or so per month. That's less than half the cost of a typical Starbucks drink.
gdanmitchell wrote:
It is probably a minor annoyance, but it also seems a bit odd to angrily insist that a company provide you with free storage and the ability to serve out versions of your photo for free as well.
It seems that you regard the ability to access the file for yourself and so the you can embed it elsewhere has value - otherwise you would care about this if the value was small. Yet you aren't interested in paying anything for this thing of value.
The cost of a Flickr membership, if I recall correctly, is about $25/year... or $2 or so per month. That's less than half the cost of a typical Starbucks drink.
Oh, boy. So much is wrong here I don't even know where to start.
First I'm neither angry, nor do I insist that Flickr provide me with anything. I am surprised, astonished, maybe, at Yahoo's policy, but I don't get angry at corporations :-) I also don't think they owe me anything.
Having said that, let me point out that the dominant Internet business model -- I might even say an *expected* one -- is to provide free services in exchange for user content and eyeballs. It doesn't seem to be a bad business model -- looks like it works well for Google which provides me with many more services of value than Yahoo does, and all of them are entirely free. It seems to work well for Facebook as well. And for Pinterest. And for Photobucket. And a very large number of other web-based services, large and small.
Second, Flickr used to provide free access to original files. Now I rarely take things for granted and so always have my own backup for my own files, but I can easily imagine someone who uploaded his original image files to Flickr and then deleted or lost his home copies. Such a person has *lost* access to his files unless he pays Yahoo money -- and that certainly wasn't part of the original bargain between Flickr and its users.
I also wasn't interested in embedding a link to let Flickr spend bandwidth on downloads. I wanted to actually download the file and then re-host it at another place. Turns out I can't do this. This policy makes the value of Flickr to me to be pretty much zero. So that's what I'm willing to pay them. I don't buy drinks at Starbucks, by the way.
And if I may make a general observation, I find the expectation that you have to *pay* for anything of value to be entirely wrong and somewhat disturbing. I happen to think that's a very bad way to think about the world and how it works. And that goes double for the internet :-)
"Having said that, let me point out that the dominant Internet business model -- I might even say an *expected* one -- is to provide free services in exchange for user content and eyeballs."
Corporations exist to make profit, regardless of a particular business model. The goal isn't first and foremost to make users happy. I'm guessing they chose to only allow paid members to download originals to save on bandwidth and contribute to their profits.
So my question is what happens to all the originals that the owners cannot download? Does Flickr get to keep them forever? Or does Flickr discard them when a non-pro member uploads them, only keeping the downsized ones?
Here's an experiment: before becoming a "pro", upload an imaage. See if you can get back the original. Then become a pro and see if you can now get at it.
BTW: what is an "original" in this context? Is it bigger than the sizes Flickr shows on their site?
