Thoughts about Flickr’s storage policy
I signed up for Flickr on December 4th. So far, the service has been simply fantastic. Flickr Uploadr lets you upload photos in batches to the service so it’s very easy to add your complete archives to the site. I’ve already uploaded 1534 photos as of today. Flickr lets you store the full-size image to their services and also allows other users to download your high-resolution images. Flickr doesn’t currently limit how many photos you can store on its site or how much disk space you can use. They limit Pro users to 1 GB of uploading traffic a month, which is huge. When I uploaded my photo archives last month, I only hit about 50% of my quota, and that was for 1500 photos!
I think Flickr is going to run into server problems with its increasing popularity. Many users have 5 megapixel or higher cameras, which makes the files saved to the service rather large. I like saving the full-size image to their site instead of downscaled ones because my friends like to download the original, uncorrupted image. Also, Flickr announced their plans to roll out a photo printing service, so having full-sized images on their site ready to go is probably a good idea. This way, family and friends can get really nice print copies from your images. Nevertheless, if every user on the service was like me, they would take up a lot of disk space. I’m unsure as to whether Ludicorp can handle thousands of accounts that take up over a gigabyte of disk space.
Already, the service is getting overwhelmed by new customers. I love Flickr and hope that their current policy doesn’t change, but it seems to me that they’re going to have to cut back somewhere to deal with the increased popularity. Either that or Google can purchase them and customers won’t ever have to worry about disk space again.