Flickr says all Creative Commons photos are exempt from picture limits | Hacker News Reader

Flickr says all Creative Commons photos are exempt from picture limits

theverge.com

110 pointsTomte27 comments

It would have been nice if the Flickr data dump kept correct timestamps on your photos. I've now got 5,000 all dated March 2019 :/

Not sure if it respects it, but maybe encode them in EXIF and update based on the EXIF data again after downloading?

FYI, to answer the question in the first paragraph of the article I just did a test upload and it worked on my free account, I have 40,000 photos on Flickr and chose not to continue my Pro account, but I think 99% of my photos had a Creative Commons license.

Do people who care about not-having picture limits still use flickr?

Yes. They pay for "Pro" accounts.

Yes, I pay for a Pro account. I do appreciate Flickr.

I paid for a Pro account for a long time, but moved to Google Photos after noticing that Flickr was left to rot. Not going back.

I used to pay for pro to have flickr as my cloud photo backup (with bonus ability to share some of my photos with friends and family). had to switch over to spideroak after flickr did its restructuring.

It seems to me that the Creative Commons exemption that SmugMug put in place significantly blunted the criticism that they were removing a large quantity of photographs from the digital commons.

Personally, I might have preferred that they excluded non-commercial and non-modify variants but, as a practical matter, those probably needed to be included.

TBH, I'm not sure why most people who don't want to pay wouldn't just license their photos CC--what percentage of Flickr users are going to sell photos to any meaningful degree--but maybe increasing CC licensing is part of the intent.

They disabled mass-relicensing of photos specifically so people couldn't do that (it's in the article as well)

Yes, but that's only for photos already uploaded. And you can still relicense; it just takes more work. (But sure, they're making it somewhat more difficult for someone with thousands of photos to just keep using Flickr for free with a few clicks; I don't really buy the explanation.)

Regarding the last point, it's not just a choice between "sell or give away as CC", "I don't want people to use my photos, or at least not without my individual permission" is a common mindset too.

I guess my feeling about that is "Then why would you license as CC?" It feels a little bit like wanting to license your software under an open source license but requiring that people obtain your permission before using it.

[ADDED: I do agree that many people have a reflexive desire to control things that are "theirs" or at least to keep others from making money off of it. I'm just saying that if many/most of the people who want to use Flickr for free thought about it rationally, they'd come to the conclusion that they're not really losing anything by licensing under CC.]

After all, people can already contact you and ask for your permission to use a photo (for a payment or otherwise). Organizations have done it with me lots of times. (In my experience, many want to get explicit permission even if something is licensed under CC.)

To be clear, there's absolutely nothing wrong with reserving all your rights to something you've created. But it's not open source/Creative Commons if you do so.

> Then why would you license as CC?

Your criticism should point to CC itself then. The reason to use it is that it takes a few bytes to express your license which would otherwise a lawyer to consult you. And on the other hand a potential user immediately understands whether the license is appropriate for her.

I don't have a criticism of CC. (Well, I do of non-commercial and no-derivatives, but that's a separate discussion.) If someone's willing to share their creative output in an open source way, CC-BY-SA, CC-BY, and CC0 are perfectly fine licenses. If someone's not, then they should just reserve rights.

What license should I use if I want to make it possible for podcasts to include my music into their compilations as is, because I have a artistic vision which I don't want to have destroyed, but not for Hip-Hop artists to chop it and use it in a different context because it isn't how I envision my art being used?

Or what If I want a gallery to be able to print my pictures and show it as is, again because I put in a lot of thought and work into the coherence of my artistic vision, but I don't want video artists to chop it and reuse it in a weird setting?

I think those are legitimate use cases for a license.

That's the ND (NoDerivs) variant of Creative Commons. I do sorta get the "artistic vision" aspect of ND use although it's counter to the remix idea that was pretty central to the Creative Commons concept in the first place.

> I guess my feeling about that is "Then why would you license as CC?"

I was responding to "why most people who don't want to pay wouldn't just license their photos CC" and the following bit - wanting to be paid isn't the only reason not to use CC or any other open license.

I don't really disagree--hence my addendum--but I'd still argue that, in many (but certainly not all) cases, the desire for control is rooted in a perhaps implicit suspicion that a work might have at least some potential value, if not to you, to someone else who might "unfairly" profit off it.

Or I just don’t want anyone using a picture of my kids at the beach because I think that’d be creepy?

That doesn't sound like something you should be posting to Flickr though.

I think if you don't want random people seeing and using some photo, you're probably better off not sharing it publicly rather than depending on a license to protect it.

I don’t disagree, but I was pointing out that there are other reasons people wouldn’t want to license their work as CC just because it’s on Flickr other than potential future monetary gain.

As a hobbyist, I ended up deleting all my photos and closing my account. Had they made this announcement earlier, I would have been happy to put everything as CC.

From their cameras popularity graph (https://www.flickr.com/cameras), I think the popularity of Flickr has died off with Instagram and all the various social networks. The most popular camera phone on there is iPhone 6 (2014). For point and shoots, it's the first generation RX100 (2012).

Yahoo certainly largely neglected it for a long time though I still use it myself and know other relatively serious photographers who do as well.

I'm actually a bit of two minds about comparing Flickr with social media sites like Instagram. Certainly, casual photo sharing is far more popular on those sites. On the other hand, I'd have to be convinced that a single site can really function as SmugMug or Flickr do for people who self-identify as prosumers while at the same time also being the preferred site for the typical Instagram user.

> I think the popularity of Flickr has died off with Instagram

For me it was because uploading a photo to Instagram was a trivial process (launch app, pick photo, type words, done) in an app that felt nice - Flickr's iOS app was awful. That combined with Flickr's incessant need to dick around with the UI/UX and break things lost me pretty quickly. This year I won't be renewing my Pro.

Great. Too bad Verizon pre-paid still caps my data plan.

Now, if all Flickr network traffic (ads, content, images, resources) were to be exempt from impacting Verizon pre-paid data plan bandwidth allowances, that might almost be something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com