The online photography world has been buzzing with news of change at Flickr: the new owners have made sweeping changes to the service and are limiting free users to a cap of 1,000 photos. Apparently they will be nuking everything above that for free accounts in early January. They’re also finally getting rid of the Yahoo login (thank christ), fixing comment spam problems (which never affected me because I never got many comments) and enhancing Flickr Pro (step one: moving from Yahoo data centers to AWS).

I’ve been a Flickr Pro user for 12 years (I joined the day they were bought by Yahoo, so I blame myself for all that followed) and in the last 5 or so I’ve often wondered what my money was being used for. Yahoo was happy to charge me a fee but never added anything to the service–in fact, they wound up taking some of the things I liked away (the ability to post images and text to my blog from Flickr was super handy, and that’s been gone for years now). I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how I was hosting more images from WordPress and less from Flickr, and how I might continue down that path in the future…but then I looked at my hosting bandwidth and realized it spiked when I started doing that. So I’ll keep using Flickr as my photo CDN for the time being, and get my money’s worth out of the Pro account for as long as possible. Hopefully they will start adding useful tools back in to the service in the near future.