My Pro account expired at some point, probably because I missed an email or my credit card number changed. I wasn’t using Flickr as much, having moved more to Facebook because of the structured people tagging feature. But then one day I was searching for an old treasured photo that existed only on Flickr and on the hard drive of some long forgotten and discarded mobile phone.
Flickr won’t show me that photo. If your pro account expires only your last 200 photos are shown. The only way I can get access to that photo is by paying the Pro fee.
That is absolutely no way to treat a customer.
And it doesn’t make sense for Flickr. Even though I uploaded those photos as a Pro customer, I can’t see them any more. It’s not that they aren’t just displayed on my public profile, I can’t access them in account settings, either. And even the ones that are displayed are only downloadable in a smaller resized version. Originals are held hostage as well.
and here’s the key line:
People certainly shouldn’t get comfortable using Flickr as a repository for their photos over the years, because unless you pay the Pro fee, you’ll lose them forever.
Exactly. Just as NO ONE should get comfortable using ANY service as a repository. Flickr, Box.net, SugarSync, Mozy, Google Apps, Gmail, Facebook, YouTube. Anyone that sends a piece of content to these services with no backup at home on a hard drive is going to deal with this. I believe in paying for my 4 terabyte RAID array once and putting whatever I want on there. I keep a duplicate at work for redundancy.
Paying $99 for MobileMe, $49 for Googla Apps, $25 for Flickr, $25 for Mozy, $49 for SugarSync, $99 for Amazon Cloud Storage and another $99 to Box.net is ludicrous not because it’s not convenient. I pay for all of these services because they are convenient but to think that that data is still yours once you stop paying is ridiculous. You pay for the data, stop paying and it’s no longer yours.
Arrington isn’t wrong in his argument. This is a problem with all cloud services and I have made it clear that no one should put their faith in these services.