Today I saw a new thread on the Second Life Forum: flickr updates TOS… [sic] by JeromFranzic. So… what did they do?

I read a lot of the thread, its about 8 pages as I write this. But, the actual changes weren’t posted in the thread. So I went looking for them. The blog Glamour Sause posted New Rules at Flickr – What can you do? by Kess Crystal. She has a good take on what is happening.

Flickr has sent out an email. It doesn’t really notify you of the change. There is what I thought was a promo splash, Flickr Forever. But, no it is an article about a TOS change and more limits on Free Accounts.

The changes affect only those of us using a free account. The big changes are;

• No Moderate or Restricted level images
• Only 50 private images.
• Only Safe accounts – if your account is rated Moderate or Restricted by Flickr you have a problem. Click for how to fix it.

That is not overly restrictive. But I do find it annoying. I have a few restricted images posted. Some of my friends have only restricted images posted. This will hit them hard.

Kess’ recommendations on what you can do are pretty basic. After all few us have a nuclear arsenal to threaten with. So, if we go PRO what is that going to cost? Here is the Flickr plans offerings page, Flickr Pro.

There are 3 plans; monthly (US$8.25/mo – $99/yr), Annual (US$6.00/mo – $72/yr), and bi-annual (US$5.54/mo – $132.96/renewal or $68.48/yr). As western economies crash and people talk of food outages, EMP strikes, cyber hacks to the grid…  this is not the most desirable option and requires careful consideration.

I find it unclear whether Flickr will mass delete images or they expect us to self-censor. Kess thinks it falls on us. From what I am reading on Flickr, I can’t tell what or when they will do anything or what they expect of us.

There are alternatives to Flickr. See Free image sharing. However, Flickr is popular with SL peps for a reason. I haven’t found a sharing site that will work as well. Fix The Photo lists several sharing sites I didn’t know about; Photo Sharing Sites. I may try them out to see how they work. If I do I will likely blog about my experience with them.

PS: TerryBlue1 posted a link to Tech Boomers article Best 6 Sites Like Flickr for Sharing Photo Albums.

Be warned, Flick has just made the change and most of the review sites have not caught up.

But, which site will SL users flock to? Many SL residents have Pro accounts already. They are unlikely to move as the change has no effect on them. So, we will see the SL community splitting up.

I have 1,597 followers on Flickr as of 3/31/2022. How many will I lose? …and do I really care?

For me, this is a hobby thing. I have this blog site and a huge amount of storage available for whatever here. But. I retain my SL images on my computer. I think it was with PhotoBucket or Google that I learned what it was like to have the only copy of an image in the cloud and then have the capacity reduced. Tedious pain.

Join the thread in the SL Forum to talk about this change. : flickr updates TOS…