Flickr extends deletion deadline for over-the-limit free accounts to March 12th

After rival site SmugMug acquired Flickr from Yahoo, some big changes came to the service. One of them that impacted free users is a new membership model. Users had to pay $50 for Pro membership or they would be limited to 1,000 images per account. Those who opted to keep their free accounts would have the images over 1,000 be deleted (starting with the older photos). Flickr initially gave a deadline of February 5^th. But the company just announced it is extending the deadline to March 12^th.

If you took advantage of the 1TB free storage, that meant a lot of photos. Users complained about the roadblocks they faced trying to download their archives—including only being able to download 500 images at a time as well as slow download speeds.

Source: The Verge

Pro photo hosting service SmugMug buys Flickr

After Flickr’s fate has been put up in the air with Yahoo’s sale to Verizon and being joined with AOL in Verizon’s Oath subsidiary, professional photo hosting service SmugMug wanted to help out. The company has just bought Flickr for an undisclosed amount. The photo service hasn’t been able to mount a successful comeback with tough competition in its space because of services like Instagram. But SmugMug is confident it can thrive still. SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill told USA Today “Flickr has survived through thick-and-thin and is core to the entire fabric of the internet.”

Now, whether SmugMug can revive the service is something we can’t say yet at the moment. The company promises to keep Flickr as a standalone community and will supposedly get the focus and resources it needs.

Flickr makes it easier to search for images

Hoping to boost the relevance of your searches, Flickr introduces what it calls “similarity search.” This new feature will help you look for photos that are visually similar to the one you’re currently looking at. The example it gave was doing a search for a cactus. When you input the search term, just hover over the image that looks the most like what you want. Afterwards, select the “…” menu. From there, you get an option to “Search for similar photos” and you’re good to go. This feature will hopefully help you find the images you want quicker.

iPhones become the top used ‘camera’ for Flickr uploads in 2015

For Flickr’s Year in Review, we see that the iPhone has overtaken Canon as the most used camera brand for 2015. It jumps from around 25 percent to about 30 percent over the past year, with Canon going down to roughly 20 percent in the same period. The top six most popular cameras are all Apple devices. iPhone 6, then iPhone 5s, followed by the iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 4, and then iPhone 6. The Apple domination gets broken as Canon EOS 5D Mark II takes the seventh spot but they regain it yet again with the iPhone 5c in the eighth spot.

The only other smartphone brand to make the list is Samsung with the Galaxy S4 and Galaxy S5 taking the 11^th and 13^th spot, respectively, and the Galaxy S3 taking the 19^th spot and sandwiched between two Nikon DSLRs.

Source: Flickr | Via: Apple Insider