Downside of Flickr, a Roadblock

Another quick thing I wanted to mention was a speed bump I ran into while using Flickr that they don't tell you about and I didn't see coming. I've raved about the photo sharing site for a short while now and I've even gotten a few friends and family on the site. Flickr seemed cool to me for many reasons, including their interface and the fact that they don't limit the number of pictures you can upload, only the amount of pictures (in bandwidth) you can upload per month. Although with my new camera, I'd been running up against this limit a bit more often, all I had to do was wait until a new month began and I could start uploading again.

At the beginning of this month, I was uploading a new batch of photos. For practicality, I was trying to figure out mentally if I would ever actually keep up with the full barrage of new photos we are taking and just coming to grips with the fact that I'd have to limit myself to sharing only the gems and not so much junk when ...SCREEEEECH! Uh oh. It turns out that there is another limit to this free service that they don't tell you about. You can still continue uploading, but after 200 photos the oldest pictures do not show up in your photostream. This means that only 200 of my photos will be visible or available through the navigation. For the rest older than the newest 200, if someone has bookmarked or linked directly to the page with that image they can still view it, but otherwise it can't be found in the search or my list of photos --even by me.

Ugh. That sucks. I looked at this a little deeper and realized that I have a paid @sbcglobal.net account (through my DSL) and these can be used to get a PRO Flickr account. That email address is essentially a paid Yahoo account included with my DSL and Yahoo owns Flickr. But the problem with that appears to be that I can't flip a switch and easily migrate all 200+ photos in my current account. I have to manually change things, and this is a lot of work.