Flickr says free users can exceed 1,000 photos as Creative Commons images are not counted

When Flickr announced changes to its free accounts, many users were upset to find that they were going to be limited to 1,000 photos unless they were willing to pay for Pro account. On top of this, Flickr said it would be deleting any images that took users over the limit.

But now the company has announced something of a loosening of the rules. Flickr says that all public Creative Commons works on the site are now protected from deletion. There are also new "in memoriam" accounts for deceased members.

See also:

• Flickr extends deadline, gives free users longer to download their photos
• Flickr starts to delete users' photos today -- act fast to save yours!
• How to back up your Flickr photos before your free storage space is slashed

Making the announcement, Flickr says: "When we recently announced updates to Flickr Free accounts, we stated that freely licensed public photos (Creative Commons, public domain, US government works, etc.) as of November 1, 2018 in excess of the free account limit would not be deleted. 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. We know the cost of storing and serving these images is vastly outweighed by the value they represent to the world".

Expanding on this, the company says in its announcement:

In this spirit, today we're going further and now protecting all public, freely licensed images on Flickr, regardless of the date they were uploaded. We want to make sure we preserve these works and further the value of the licenses for our community and for anyone who might benefit from them.

On top of this, Flickr is also disabling the tool that could be previously used to change image licenses in bulk. The company says this is "to prevent community members from flipping all their images to a new license without first understanding the significant implications of the various free licenses we support".

Just as Facebook allows for the creation of memorial pages for users who have died, so Flickr is doing something very similar. "In memoriam" accounts are available to Free and Pro users, and all uploaded content will be preserved -- even for Pro users whose subscription subsequently runs out. Flickr has a help article about how to nominate accounts for this new status which you can read here.

Image credit: BigTunaOnline / Shutterstock