Flickr’s New 1000 Image Limit Will Not Apply to Creative Commons Photos

• Flickr has updated its photo deletion date for free users from February 5 to March 12.
• All Free accounts will be restricted to 1,000 images while excess images will be deleted.
• The change will not be applicable to publicly licensed images even if they exceed the account limit.

Flickr announced its Flickr Pro service last year to offer unlimited storage to subscribers while imposing a 1,000-image limit for Flickr Free users. However, the image sharing platform is set to make some exceptions for accounts that have photos hosted using a Creative Commons license. Free accounts will be allowed to upload unlimited CCO images without any restrictions, and existing photos can also be updated with a CCO license or any other public license.

All free accounts with more than 1,000 images were set to have excess photos removed on February 5, but Flicker pushed the date back to March 12 to offer more time. There are hundreds of millions of websites and blogs using publicly licensed images and removing the images would disrupt the work of countless internet users. Prior to the update, it was announced that only publicly licensed images that were uploaded before November 1, 2018, would be allowed on the platform but the restriction has now been removed. Flickr has also disabled all bulk license change tools to prevent users from taking advantage of the new changes to the platform. If you want to update the licensing information for a large number of photos you have to do them manually for each image.

The photo-sharing platform has implemented a new “in memoriam” feature that will allow accounts of deceased users to be preserved. Logins to the accounts will be blocked, and no account limitations will be imposed even if Pro subscriptions expire for the accounts. Other members can also request the accounts to be removed from the platform. Facebook implemented a similar feature for accounts of deceased users earlier this week to preserve all photos and content and also added a new “Tributes” section for users to pay respects and share memories.

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