Flickr announces all public Creative Commons works are now protected from deletion

Image: LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images

Just days before Flickr mass deletes photos across its platform, the company has decided to hit its users with some good news.

In a blog post on Friday, Flickr that it will allow free accounts to host and upload more than the 1,000 photo limit if the photos are licensed freely under Creative Commons. Users can change their current photos to Creative Commons licensing, as well as upload future similarly licensed photos, to their free Flickr accounts.

After Flickr, one of the largest photo-sharing website, was acquired by Smugmug last year, the company announced to its account policies. Free accounts would be limited to no more than 1,000 image uploads. Photos exceeding that limit would be deleted from users’ free accounts. If a Flickr user wanted to keep those photos or upload more than 1000, they would need to upgrade to a paid “pro” level account.

The photo-sharing platform originally planned to on February 5 but have since pushed it back to March 12.

Flickr had also announced at the time that publicly licensed photos uploaded prior to Nov 1, 2018 would be exempt from deletion. 

“We wanted to make sure we didn’t disrupt the hundreds of millions of stories across the global internet that link to freely licensed Flickr images,” said Flickr’s announcement. “We know the cost of storing and serving these images is vastly outweighed by the value they represent to the world.”

Now, the company has extended its policy to host public Creative Commons licensed works regardless of when they were uploaded.

Along with this announcement, Flickr has disabled its bulk license change tools so users couldn’t just change the licensing on their photos en masse. Flickr says it wants its users to understand “the significant implications of the various free licenses we support” when choosing to update the license on their photos.

Flickr has also “in memoriam” accounts for users that pass away. When a member of the Flickr community dies, users can nominate that account to be locked and preserved. The account will be designated an “in memoriam” status and logins to the account will be blocked. The photo-sharing service will keep all the uploads on the account, even when their pro subscription lapses and their free account exceeds 1,000 photos. 

After the original 1,000 limit policy change disappointed so many in the Flickr community, It’s good to see some positive news that centers its users. But, reminder: the photo-sharing service still plans to delete all non-Creative Commons licensed photos on free accounts exceeding the photo limit on March 12.