If you are a photographer and have your streaming on Flickr you already know. The platform declared that from January 8, 2019 free accounts can’t upload over 1,000 photos or videos.

Launched in 2004 as a tool of Game Neverending, a virtual world developed by canadian Ludicorp, the platform was then bought by Yahoo!, then by Verizon and finally by SmugMug,

Virtual photographers are real photographers

The news generated a certain hustle and bustle within the user community of virtual worlds like Second Life, The Sims, World of Warcraft etc. People feared that “virtual” photographers were not considered photographers in all respects and therefore their images could be simply eliminated with effect from January 8th.

Intervening in an online forum Flickr’s Ceo, Don MacAskill, btw, denied this rumor: “virtual photographers are photographers” explained MacAskill. “I don’t know where the idea that you aren’t “real” photographers, or that virtual photography is somehow spam, came from but that’s not from me. You are welcome at Flickr” he added.

From January new and more binding Tos

Be considered in all respects photographers also means being subject to all the new Flickr’s Terms of service (Tos), particularly where you are asked not to use Flickr for unauthorized commercial activities.

“If you have a free account and don’t have a Flickr Pro account, you may not link directly to a shopping cart, checkout page, or pricing pages on other sites, and you may not list prices on your Flickr photo descriptions”.

In short, Flickr loves Second Life and virtual worlds in general, the “virtual photos” and the many and still very active communities that have arisen around them.

For instance the group Mondi Virtuali – Virtual Worlds (to discover follow this link: https://www.flickr.com/groups/mondivirtuali) from which the images of this article are also drawn by Paola Mills, Giovanna Silvestri, and Brida Skynny.

But as other social media, Facebook for first, the new owner decided to try to monetize its services better. Free meals, if they ever existed, are now a memory also on the web.

If you want to know how it will end continue to follow Mondivirtuali.it, also through our account on Twitter and our fanpage on Facebook (but remember: Mondivirtuali is also on Flickr, on Pinterest, on Scoop.it and on Paper.li, as well as on Youtube) and maybe subscribe our newsletter!