AppleInsider reports that Flickr is set to bring its free users down to a quota of 1,000 pictures, forcibly, from 8th January 2019…

“Flickr just says the deletion will begin “from oldest to newest date uploaded” until you’re down to the 1,000 limit.”

This will be a bit of a disaster for free users with lots of pictures. Many archival collections of pulp covers, ‘Lovecraft locations’, etc are going to be forcibly truncated. Many users are no longer around to save their collections, either having died or been locked out due to Yahoo/Flickr getting so badly hacked a while ago.

Escapees from the Yahoo/Flickr disaster-zone will need Bulkr Pro for bulk downloading. A year ago I backed up 2,100 full-res Flickr pictures into themed folders with relative ease. Account access is not needed, just publicly available photos. I then switched to the 500px service, which is relatively stylish and is about the best bulk ‘photo galleries’ option.

500px has some limitations, but cosmetic matters can be fixed with things like the “500px Download button and enable right-click” UserScript. One thing that can’t be so easily bypassed is that 500px are partnered with evil stock-photography megacorp Getty, which means they don’t allow Creative Commons tagging or CC downloads.

The best option for Flickr escapees is thus, in my experience…

* Bulkr Pro and a 500px account.
* a free WordPress blog with a good free gallery theme (Dyad 2) for your Creative Commons pictures.

Though the 500px browser-based bulk uploader is not ideal, and not everyone will love the new WordPress back-end user interface. Neither has dedicated Creative Commons tagging other than manually via the internal tag system.

If anyone can point me to a Flickr-hosted Lovecraft / R.E. Howard / Sci-fi / Pulp collection not likely to be saved from the January purge, then I can use my Bulkr Pro software to go get them in full-size.