Free Vs Pro Accounts
Flickr has two kinds of acounts: Free and Pro. Free is just that, free. But there are some limitations.
Flickr pro is an incredible deal, and worth every cent. Flickr pro is the best deal out there for storing photos. bar none. I have my own domain and server space and I removed my photo gallery for flickr, I couldn’t host my own for the price of a Pro account.
Free: $0
- Only latest 200 pictures are viewable (you can have more, but only the latest 200 can be accessed. If you go pro, the hidden pictures will be available which is nice if you lapse.)
- Post any of your photos in up to 10 group pools
- Only smaller (resized) images accessible (though the originals are saved in case you upgrade later)
- Unlimited sets
- Ads.
Pro: $24 year
- Unlimited pictures and storage. No limits on how many pics you can upload (size limit for each photo raised to 20 mb max – thats a HUGE photo)
- Unlimited sets and collections (this is worth it alone)
- ad-free (I never noticed how many ads there were till I logged in on an alternater free account once… wow lots of ads.)
- Post pics in up to 60 group pools.
- Stats on your photos (awesome, I’ve found so many refs to my stuff, this gives you a way to follow up and leave comments and thank folks for the linkage)
- Ability to replace a photo (more useful that you’d think if you want to swap a better version and not lose all your comments, or have two of the same thing up)
- Upload short video clips (most cameras now shoot 60-90 second vid clips, flickr calls them ‘long pictures’. this more of a fun thing, but it’s still cool)
- Archiving of high-resolution original images : this is more significant than you first think. When you have a free account you can’t access any “original” size photos you upload, they are there you can’t get to them so using flickr as a back up is largely difficult. But being pro means you have a offsite backup, and after I suffered TWO hard drive fails in two months and lost EVERYTHING locally it saved me.
- Alternative layout templates for your account homepage. They have a few different options (1 column, 2, 3, sidebar with your choice of collections or sets listing). So you have some options to say what you want peopel to see when they arrive at your top page. Big pics? Small pics? Sets or collections, or neither? Your choice.
- Ability to make “Collections” featuring other members work to more easily share groups of pics with others.
- No ads.
As a pro user I’ve found it totally worth the $24 a year. You won’t find a better list of offerings, or a nicer group of folks. Google charges much more for less on Picasa. Hosting on your own site can cost hundreds for the same space.
I even buy pro accounts for my friends and family for birthdays and they all consider it as fabulous as I do. My mom even makes money on her pics and they are just what she takes for fun and not in anyway a professional picture. I’ve sold use to photos for design jobs around the world. Flickr in our case has paid for itself more than a few times.
Whew! That is pretty comprehensive.
People should know though, that even if you set your photos so that no one can download and print them, they still can download and print them. It’s just a little more work but any photo from Flickr can be saved to someone else’s computer and printed. Their “spaceball” trick will only slow down a determined image thief, not prevent them.
If you really REALLY don’t want anyone saving your photos, it’s best not to put them online at all.