Don MacAskill, CEO of Flickr-owner SmugMug, on why the service will end Flickr's free 1TB storage and delete all but the last 1,000 photos from free accounts
Stephen Shankland / CNET : Tweets: @techledes and @stshank Tweets: Connie Guglielmo / @techledes : Less than 3% of Flickr's free users have 1,000+ photos, but that's still millions of people since 100mln+ use Flickr, writes @stshank. The death of Geocities, MySpace & Google+ show there's no guarantee everything published on the internet will endure. http://www.cnet.com/... Stephen Shankland / @stshank : CEO @DonMacAskill defends new 1000-photo limit for free @flickr accounts in Q&A with CNET. Lots of new pro subscribers since Nov. 1 policy change, but he says free members are still important. <3% of users directly affected by the change. http://www.cnet.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This Q&A is Don MacAskill's first public defense of the changes that came with Flickr's November decision to kill the free 1TB tier: free accounts keep only their most recent 1,000 photos, with deletions set for February 2019 unless users upgrade to Pro. It lands seven months after SmugMug bought Flickr from Oath promising to revitalize it as a standalone service, and alongside the quieter fix of dropping the mandatory Yahoo sign-in.
The math MacAskill offers explains why the cut is survivable: fewer than 3% of Flickr's 100-million-plus free users hold more than 1,000 photos, yet that minority still numbers in the millions — and he says Pro subscriptions have climbed since the November 1 change. The CNET writeup frames the stakes through Geocities, MySpace and Google+, services whose shutdowns erased published work.
First-order effects
- Millions of long-time free users with deep archives must upgrade to Pro, prune their libraries, or export their photos before the February 2019 deletion deadline — while Flickr converts a slice of them into paying subscribers, per MacAskill's claim of strong new Pro signups.
- The change completes a years-long narrowing of Flickr's free tier that began when the desktop Auto-Uploadr was restricted to Pro members in 2016, signaling that SmugMug's 'revitalization' means monetization rather than restoration of the old generosity.
Second-order effects
- Rival photo services inherit both an opportunity and a template: migrating Flickr users become acquisition targets, and the move normalizes capping free storage — a path Google later followed by ending free unlimited Google Photos uploads in favor of a 15GB cap.
- Storage economics shift from a land-grab metric to a revenue line: with Flickr proving users will pay after a hard deletion deadline, competitors' 'unlimited free' promises become a cost liability they must eventually unwind too.
Third-order effects
- If the Flickr and Google moves mark the end of the free-unlimited-storage era, consumer photo archiving becomes a paid utility — and each platform's solvency, not just its features, becomes part of the preservation calculus for personal and public image collections.
- The Geocities/MySpace/Google+ comparison points toward structural demand for user-controlled exports and third-party archival tools, as photographers learn that hosting platforms can delete at scale with contractual notice alone.
The trend: Consumer photo platforms are dismantling free-unlimited storage and converting dormant archives into subscription revenue, forcing users to treat cloud libraries as perishable rather than permanent.