all I want, ALL i want right now, is my photostream to show in the correct order. that is, backwards from how flikr thinks it should be. is this a japanese time travellers tool or something?

...and, woo, the new Free/Pro account changes are apparently "to better align Flickr with its mission". I thought the mission was being a free to use photo hosting service with paid bolt-ons if you wanted/needed them, but apparently it's now to squeeze fifty bucks a year out of as many people as possible. To the extent of /deleting existing content/ if you don't pay to keep it up. Even though the space needed for 2000 photos instead of 1000 is chickenfeed these days, and gets cheaper year on year, so it wouldn't exactly hurt them administratively or financially to keep the existing Free accounts as-is, merely preventing further uploads. It's maybe a one-off cost of a couple bucks per user (you can fit that many on a 8GB memory card with ease after all, and they're heading towards being worthless on the market... never mind the equivalent cost of hard drive storage, which would be pennies), which would be easily recouped in a week or two of advertising revenue.

One brilliant side effect of this is that any existing albums held by free users who have died or are otherwise unable to access their account before February (and this probably also means any Pro customers whose payments stop, probably for the same reasons) will be massacred indiscriminately, along with any group collections they contribute to.

Shouldn't really be surprised, though. It's the exact same sort of thing that Yahoo pulled after taking over Geocities, though not *quite* as extreme. Either you had to pay a ludicrous amount to keep your page active (which I did for a while, before deciding that $13 PER MONTH was absolutely not worth it when other hosting solutions were available for free, or as little as $1 a year), or suffer it being ... not frozen, not archived, but vaporised.

I'm fully expecting Yahoo's core Mail service, which has been free for *more than twenty years* now, to switch to a similar model before too long. Free users get a very restricted storage allowance, probably based on an arbitrary number of messages rather than any kind of actual storage concern (not that email takes up any kind of serious space in 2010s terms, let alone what will be 2020s), and if you want to enjoy the same still-not-particularly-brilliant level of service as everyone has at the moment, you have to pay a crazy annual or monthly fee vs what anyone else charges.

Anyway, guess that'll be me downloading all my shared pictures and shifting them across to Imgur or somewhere like that, then. Or maybe Google Photos, which restricts max rez somewhat (...like Flickr does anyway) but sets absolutely no numerical storage limit whatsoever.

Fuck's sake, Yahoo/Oath... are you deliberately trying to alienate your userbase? It sure seems that way with basically every business decision you make.