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In 2013 (the same year that Yahoo bought Tumblr), the company announced that all users would get a free terabyte of storage on the platform - more space than your average person could really imagine using - and that Pro accounts would be more expensive and offer virtually unlimited storage. In 2007, Yahoo discontinued its own photo service and compelled all of those users to move over to Flickr or lose their data.

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“Flickr, at least for our purposes, has become something of a time capsule for late-2000s internet - one that has helped us document many cultural trends of the mid-to-late aughts.” He hopes some of the images will be archived somewhere else, but says, “More likely, be lost either because people don’t remember their Flickr password, don’t want their pictures online anymore, or simply don’t hear about the shutdown.” Big chunks of our online cultural history is disappearing, and there’s one company to put a lot of blame onįlickr was founded in 2004 by Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield and serial tech entrepreneur Caterina Fake, then acquired by Yahoo in 2005. “In general, it’s never great when a vast trove of online content is taken down,” he writes.

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We have warehouses full of forgotten items, museum basements, physical spaces that are not unlike digital photo collections in their general uselessness - “In a sense, something only exists when somebody comes along and finds it, in a certain time, with a certain search in mind.”īut Matt Schimkowitz, an editor at the internet culture database Know Your Meme, tells Vox that this content was being used. Memorabilia has always been lost to time or poor storage. This is not unique to the internet, though, he argues. “In the end, probably not many people will notice what is lost, because we didn’t know what was there” If you haven’t found it by now and kept it safe, you will probably never know.” There’s so much data now, you’ll find something else. “It’s not comforting, it’s just simply a fact. “In the end, probably not many people will notice what is lost, because we didn’t know what was there.” Klingemann says, getting a little bit sad after all. But the beauty of this abundance of data is the process of discovery and finding the golden nuggets in this huge desert of non-relevant information.”

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Noting that the photos that fall under a free, Creative Commons fair-use license are safe - both by Flickr’s promise and because the Internet Archive is busily making duplicates - he says, “I’m not totally in tears because the most relevant stuff will still be available. “Of course, anything on the internet that is free is kind of … probably not forever.” Mario Klingemann, a digital artist and archivist based in Germany, tells Vox that he wasn’t surprised when Flickr announced the end of its free terabyte in November. For the New York Times last November, tech columnist John Hermann labeled the problem of digital photo storage “the great unsolved tech support question of the last 30 years,” and asked, “Do you know where your photos are?” At the very least, this an occasion to think more seriously about the precarity of all images entrusted to free services or erodible devices.īefore we freak out: A lot of the important stuff is already being saved. You could also argue that there might have come a day when we wanted them. You could argue that they are things nobody cares about, the type of detritus that is lost all the time, everywhere, for lots of reasons.

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These are, after all, photos that users didn’t bother to download in the three-month warning period that SmugMug gave them.

What does deleting millions of photos mean for the history of the internet? In some ways, it doesn’t mean much.

But if you care about the history of the culture of the internet and the forces that are shaping its future, you should note this moment as an important one.

This fact may be largely undisturbing to you if you never used the platform to store a significant amount of your photos. They’ll bear almost no resemblance to the entire basements they once were. Now, free Flickr accounts are, if anything, one extra filing cabinet. The company, which has been financially troubled for some time and was sold by Yahoo to photo-hosting service SmugMug in April 2018, will discontinue its free terabyte of storage for all users and started deleting files from accounts that exceed the new cap of 1,000 photos, starting March 12 (the deadline has been extended following outcry from users). Flickr, the photo storage website that had, at its peak, close to 90 million users, is disintegrating, and it’s taking 15 years of internet history with it.