To Stay Or To Go
Our Flickr account expires soon, and I’m not sure I want to renew it. The problems I’m having are mostly policy related that 1) I’m seeing waaaay too many claims that Flickr is deleting accounts without warning and without every telling the account holders why. I’m getting this feedback from photography blogs. You can expect it to happen sometimes, but I’m seeing posts titled “Flickr deleted another account without explanation again” way too often. They would only be losing photos if they don’t have back-ups elsewhere which I have not heard that as the complaint. The biggest complaint is that the photographer has lost time and what they perceive as valuable feedback. Flickr isn’t just a gallery. It has a social component built into it, and to remove people and refusing to give an explanation is not acceptable.
The other worry is Yahoo! not giving any clear explanation of what will happen to Flickr during their recent announcement of what services they are no longer supporting. People were not too happy when Yahoo! obtained Flickr to begin with, and I don’t blame them, really.
My alternate service I want to use is SmugMug. Pro photographers love it. It is a tad more expensive, but it does hook into other services to share photos as well as has plug-ins for Lightroom so I can upload straight from there. I may just bite into the extra cost and go there.
They do have a free account option, should my friends want to jump ship as well. Or PicasaWeb, which features do not appeal to me, but for most people’s photo needs, the desktop app is awesome. I have it set-up for Ada to manage her photos. I get the photos off her camera using my laptop. I have those folders synced with her Google account, which uploads them to PicasaWeb which in turn is synced to the Picasa app I have installed on the kids Ubuntu machine downstairs so they have them there.
