The photo hosting and community site Flickr has been a popular option for free and paying users from all over the world to back up their photos to online storage, share them with others, find new photos to download, and to interact with other community members.
The site changed its owner years ago and since have been getting worse for free users ever since. First, new owners SmugMug limited free users to 1000 photos, down from 1 terabyte of photo storage, and to 50 non-public photos.
Now, starting May 15th, 2025, free users face another limitation on the site. Their ability to download photos is limited to 1024 pixels and less in resolution. Means: free users can’t download the original resolution of a photo anymore nor the large version of it, including their own uploaded photos.
Why Flickr is making the change: Flickr says that it is implementing the change to address “the misuse of free accounts as cloud storage for original files”. This voilates Flickr’s terms of services and affects the performance for paying customers negatively.
The change does not affect the uploading of photos “of all accepted file sizes to a free account”. Flickr notes that creative commons photos can continue to be downloaded in all available sizes, provided that they are not set to private. Additionally, Flickr Commons members are also exempt from the change.
Photos will display in high quality on the site and “embeds and external links” won’t break either.
Flickr recommends upgrading to a paid Pro account to keep the downloading functionality.
Closing Words
Is Flickr still a popular option for photographers and still going strong community-wise? Many of the recent changes limit free users on the site, likely to push more users into subscribing to a Pro account. I can’t really say how well the strategy works, but the limitations are certainly driving some Flickr users to different photo hosting platforms.
Speaking of which, do you upload photos to online photography sites or photo storage sites? Or do you prefer to keep photos and images on your local devices and systems only? Feel free to leave a comment down below.