I’ve been a member of the photo site Flickr since about 2005.

During those early years, well before the postage stamp sized galleries of Instagram, I was posting high quality photography.

I made friends on there, I found contacts, I met fellow photographers. Way more people, in fact, who shared my interests.

People would leave “endorsements” on my page, and comment, and you could download high quality photographs from other photographers. Some of these, in fact, I framed and hung in my living room.

It cost about $24.95 to join, and every year, for 13 years, it would renew and I would happily continue the service.

I used it in 2008 to upload many slide images, scanned from my father’s Kodak carousels.

There was a way to organize all of one’s photos in albums and later collections (a number of albums could become a “collection.”)

The interface was somewhat clumsy, with a page called “Organize” where your entire photo collection was stored. You could come here and change the dates on a photo, or place a picture on a map at the exact place you took that photo.

For all these years, the map function has never worked properly.

Last week, for example, I was down in Hermosa Beach, and later I uploaded photos to Flickr, and typed in “Hermosa Beach, CA” and the map came up with “No Results Found.”

The map below shows the last location I used in Zug, Switzerland. When I typed “Hermosa Beach, CA” the map didn’t recognize that location.

Every year since 2018, they’ve increased the price. Even as Flickr has declined in popularity, even as the use of Flickr belongs to the era of Yahoo, MySpace and AOL.

For renewal in September 2023, Flickr sent me an email:

$71.99, a 20% increase from $59.99. And a 188% increase from $24.99 which was the yearly renewal fee as recently as 2018. I know there is a war going on in Ukraine, there are grain shortages, and the pandemic exacerbated oil, housing and raw materials prices. But what raw materials does Flickr use to make its product?

So I have made the decision to end my Flickr subscription next month.