Flickr Download Updates

(Yes, Flickr still exists.)

I saw via one of the poets I follow on Bluesky that Flickr will be making some updates in mid-May to disallow downloads of original- and large-sized images from free accounts. According to them (and honestly, I believe it), this is to prevent abuse of the service as a kind of free cloud storage.

I'm a little sad, though, because I still use Flickr: I do a little small press publishing and sometimes use Flickr for the cover images when I find something I like and the license permits. Hopefully this will still work? We'll see. Flickr feels like the flickering screen of an older internet. It's still there; so's Angelfire and Tripod, somehow. The rest of it gone, traces of it still there in the Wayback Machine but maddeningly incomplete.

But Flickr is wonderful. So many pictures lovingly taken by so many people at the start of the social media age, before Instagram's catchy filters, and before it broke the chronological timeline for the same ads, slop, and influencers that now feel inescapable. Bless.