![]() By the end of 2001, its home page had been replaced with an apology letter.īut online photo collections kept growing - where else would we go? Newer, more credible services hustled for users. At the turn of the century a site called Zing promised, in a first, “free unlimited online storage” for photos. The first services that beckoned us to what was not yet widely known as the cloud set the tone for what was to come. If you could produce a Zip drive in 2018, it would likely regurgitate whatever you fed it. In retrospect, well-intentioned guidance reads like a manual for the obliteration of memory. The problem of what to do with ballooning digital photo collections, on the other hand, is perhaps the great unsolved tech support question of the last 30 years. Their peculiar sort of pricelessness made archivists of regular people. To the people who took them, they were deeply valuable to anyone else, mostly worthless. Are these prints fading, and how fast? Are they organized by year or by subject? Do I know where they are? Holding on to pictures was, for most of the history of photography, a matter of material decay and physical storage. Most of us don’t, at least not exactly, or in terms that we fully understand. It would have had a better run than most.Īnd here it is, almost 2019. A digital photo first uploaded to Yahoo at the turn of the century, in other words, when most people online were still dialing in to get there, and not once again rescued this year, may finally meet its demise. Users could begin paying or take the rest elsewhere. This news came with a new default storage limit: 1,000 photos. By making promises it couldn’t back up, based on an advertising model that it couldn’t sustain, Flickr said, Yahoo had “attracted members who were drawn by the free storage,” rather than “lovers of photography.” People were producing more photos than ever, but it still wasn’t clear where they were supposed to end up.Įarlier this year, Flickr, now owned by Oath, a subsidiary of Verizon, made another announcement: It would be selling to SmugMug, a smaller competitor. (“We want all your photos,” said Adam Cahan, a Yahoo executive at the time.)īy then, digital cameras were ubiquitous and smartphones had gone mainstream. ![]() In 2013, the company announced that Flickr users would have a terabyte of space - for most people, an effectively unlimited amount - to store images for free. In 2007, Yahoo announced it would discontinue that first photo service, and that users should move their photos to Flickr, which now required a Yahoo account to use. But don’t worry, the company said: The two could happily coexist. It already had a photo site, Yahoo! Photos, which was created in March 2000. In 2005, Yahoo acquired Flickr, the popular photo site.
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