Comment by evoxed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evoxed | Hacker News Reader

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I've always had issues with certain details on Flickr (perhaps since the Yahoo acquisition; I honestly can't remember what was just carried over) such as the inability to download all your photos at once for backup, lockout of your own photos when your pro membership expires (combined with the aforementioned non-feature), and some other things. But as far as I can tell, the community is definitely there. Whenever I am doing research on1 particular piece of equipment or materials (chemicals mostly) I'll often find a fairly helpful discussion on Flickr, and with plenty of well-tagged shots to back it up.

Earlier this year while I was staying in Ginza for the weekend a spring popped inside one of my lenses. I have some experience repairing and rebuilding mechanical SLRs (not so much lenses) but without any tools or parts I was hoping to find a repair shop nearby that wouldn't break the bank. Ended up finding a pic on Flickr from someone who had the same issue a few years ago of him and the repairman with his Victor Hasselblad diploma, and his business card. Totally random place on the 8th floor in San-chome, but he was a great guy who I never would've met if not for that post.

> I've always had issues with certain details on Flickr (perhaps since the Yahoo acquisition; I honestly can't remember what was just carried over) such as the inability to download all your photos at once for backup

The dozens of Flickr downloader apps, and countless free scripts on GitHub, let you not only download them all for backup, but often will keep them in sync with folders. Even iPhoto has this sync built in.

> lockout of your own photos when your pro membership expires (combined with the aforementioned non-feature), and some other things.

They notify you before it expires, and said tools take not long at all.

What's more, their policy is incredibly generous: they retain all the photos for you, and when you re-up, everything's back as it was. That's extraordinary customer service.

Flickr never locks you out of access to your photos, per se.

The only difference is that your photostream is limited to 200 photos. Every other way that photos are accessed continues to work - whether you've embedded them on blogs, other people favorited them, etc.

There are 3rd party tools to export your photos from Flickr via the API. Flickr hasn't written their own exporter (they probably should) but exporting apps aren't blocked.

That's what I thought too, but when I tried to grab them with existing apps the only way I could get it to work was by adding everything to a group and then searching for that. Can't remember if it was FlickrDown that finally worked or something else– three others flat out failed to capture anything until I resubscribed. So in theory they're still there, but they sure don't make it easy.

What would you have them do when your Pro a account expires?

I would like downloading everything to zip to be a pro feature, and a reminder that the feature exists in an email maybe one week prior to expiration. If customers leave, let them leave happily. They'll be much more likely to come back when they want/need the service again.

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