from Hacker News

Original & Large Size Download Limitations on Free Accounts

by indrora on 4/18/25, 10:12 PM with 2 comments

• by benoau on 4/18/25, 11:37 PM

  > We’re addressing the misuse of free accounts as cloud storage for original files—a practice that violates our Terms of Service and negatively impacts the performance and experience for Pro members.

  Safeguarding the original of a photo, a feature of Flickr since actual decades, is a TOS violation apparently.

  I wonder if ChatGPT wrote this or if execs at Flickr are just this stupid.

  I wonder how many layoffs they're conspiring to make with this absurd policy change.

• by mubou on 4/18/25, 11:34 PM

  Making people pay to download their own images they uploaded is pretty scummy. Were people actually using Flickr as cloud storage? They could have just put a captcha on downloads to solve that if so. It's not like the bandwidth cost of a full-size jpeg is that significant; this is 100% a cashgrab.

  (Edit: I thought they meant like automated cloud storage, something that would obviously be a ToS violation, because as benoau pointed out, hosting your photos is literally the whole point of Flickr. Having the full-size original photo there was its selling point.)