Originally Posted by
canklecat
The only thing good about Photobucket was it managed to make Flickr seem good. I think I still have a Flickr account but haven't used it in years. My ISP fees used to include a premium subscription to Flickr, but when they discontinued that I never bothered to pay. Flickr never managed to develop decent tools for archiving photos. I switched to Google for awhile because auto-backups worked seamlessly in the background without being a resource hog. Flickr never managed that.
The Strava move reminded me of Flickr's move a couple years ago - piling on free features and then taking them away.
I was a paying Flickr subscriber for years, and then Flickr changed their model and essentially encouraged people like me to go 'Free' by making the storage allotment massive and concentrating the 'Premium' features on things like viewing stats, showing where your viewing traffic was coming from, etc (none of which was important to me - I just wanted adequate storage and the ability to share among groups and friends). So I went the Free route for a while, using less than 1% of my storage allotment, until Flickr was bought by another entity and they switched tacks completely - instead of a data storage cap, they decided to cap the number of images that you could store. This instantly moved me from less than 1% of capacity to about 200% of capacity, and the pricing structure and feature set was so not worth it. On top of that, and far worse than Strava, they said that, if any Free users were over their cap, they'd be deleting pictures, oldest to newest, until the user was back under the cap. Then the user would have to delete a picture from their storage before they could upload another new image.
It was a lot of bull****. I stopped being an active user, though I'd check in occasionally; it seemed as if others had curbed their activity, too.