Flickr, The Latest Company That Yahoo Killed

Sorry Flickr lovers, but Yahoo just killed your favorite photo sharing platform.

It was recently announced that Flickr (owned by Yahoo) will now charge users $50 a year to automatically upload photos from their computer, phone or external hard drives — a service that was previously part of its free plan. This means that now, all the suckers that gained renewed hope for Flickr last May when it offered the Auto-Uploadr tool for free, will have to upgrade to a Flickr Pro account to simply upload photos automatically. It’s worth noting, automatic photo uploading is positively free using other tools like Google Photos.

Related: Lessons learned from Yahoo’s painful failure

“The move feels a bit like ransomware, Yahoo forcing people who’ve already bought into the idea of Flickr as a permanent backup to start paying for the privilege,” writes David Pierce from Wired. “And it kills the notion that Flickr can be a useful, simple, automatic way to keep all your photos backed up in one place.”

Truer words have not been spoken.

Long ago, Flickr was a one-of-a-kind photo sharing platform where shutterbug enthusiasts had their own community to edit, share and comment on each others art. Those days were short lived though, as rival photo services from Google, Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive and Instagram took over. The only thing that kept Flickr users around was likely its superior photo organization (now not so superior) and the fact that many users had old photos already stored.

Related: Why people don’t trust Facebook and Google, according to study

Fast forward to today and there really is NO reason to stay with Flickr as a causal photographer. It no longer has superior organization and search capabilities, and moving your photos out of Flickr and into other cloud-based photo tools is dead simple.

We’d like to point out that Flickr’s anticipated death is the latest example of a company acquired by Yahoo only to be brought to its knees. Just a few weeks ago we wrote about Yahoo’s uncanny ability to suck the life out of everything it touches, and Flickr is no exception.

Since 1997, Yahoo has acquired more than 120 smaller companies only to have a current value of about $1 billion, factoring out its ownership of Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, as well as company cash.

We don’t want to gloat here, but it’s safe to say we nailed it when we wrote:

“Yahoo buys web properties, devours the soul of each and then puts them into the Yahoo graveyard of (once cool) websites.”

Goodbye Flickr. Sorry to see you go.