“Of course, anything on the internet that is free is kind of … probably not forever.” Mario Klingemann, a digital artist and archivist based in Germany, tells Vox that he wasn’t surprised when Flickr announced the end of its free terabyte in November. For the New York Times last November, tech columnist John Hermann labeled the problem of digital photo storage “the great unsolved tech support question of the last 30 years,” and asked, “Do you know where your photos are?” At the very least, this an occasion to think more seriously about the precarity of all images entrusted to free services or erodible devices.īefore we freak out: A lot of the important stuff is already being saved. You could also argue that there might have come a day when we wanted them. You could argue that they are things nobody cares about, the type of detritus that is lost all the time, everywhere, for lots of reasons. These are, after all, photos that users didn’t bother to download in the three-month warning period that SmugMug gave them. What does deleting millions of photos mean for the history of the internet? In some ways, it doesn’t mean much. But if you care about the history of the culture of the internet and the forces that are shaping its future, you should note this moment as an important one. This fact may be largely undisturbing to you if you never used the platform to store a significant amount of your photos.

They’ll bear almost no resemblance to the entire basements they once were. Now, free Flickr accounts are, if anything, one extra filing cabinet. The company, which has been financially troubled for some time and was sold by Yahoo to photo-hosting service SmugMug in April 2018, will discontinue its free terabyte of storage for all users and started deleting files from accounts that exceed the new cap of 1,000 photos, starting March 12 (the deadline has been extended following outcry from users). Flickr, the photo storage website that had, at its peak, close to 90 million users, is disintegrating, and it’s taking 15 years of internet history with it.

Flickr is free