Flickr In Trouble?

I was in New York with my friend Clarisel yesterday, and we got to talking about our various media endeavors. She told me that Yahoo, which owns Flickr, is losing money, and so it's possible, however unlikely, that Flickr could be terminated and anyone who posts photos there could lose them. Clarisel has ten times the number of pictures I have, and I have a lot, and she's already considering which ones she hopes to save.

Let me stress and re-assert that neither one of us has any firsthand knowledge of any possible shutdown of Flickr. This is pure conjecture and speculation on our part. And, if not for a technical difficulty in posting of photos I made tonight (January 29) on Flickr, I wouldn't have even considered such a possibility.

I uploaded three pictures, and it took forever for Flickr to process them due to an error on the page. I never got the message saying that it was finished processing; I simply checked my photostream in another window to see if they took. When I saw that they did, I closed the upload page and added descriptions and tags on each individual photo - i.e., the hard way -in the other window. This led me to suspect one of two things: Flickr is struggling all of a sudden and could be in serious trouble, or; something is wrong with my computer. As I depend on Flickr for photo sharing and publicizing my amateur photography, I find myself in the unenviable position of hoping it was my PC.

Okay, not really - my PC is only nine months old. But it would be terrible if Flickr suddenly went away, despite the problems I've had with it of late. (Sometimes the Facebook feed doesn't work.) Be that as it may, Yahoo is trying to do something about it. Yahoo has made a three-month version of its Pro service option, which includes unlimited uploads, for $6.95, with the cost for the two-year version (which I have) reduced to $44.95 from 47.99, in an effort to get more customers who have otherwise balked and longer-term subscriptions. (The one-year subscription remains $24.95, which is much less economical than four three-month subscriptions - do the math.) But with other social network sites gaining popularity for photo sharing, and with Flickr remaining mostly unchanged with few new features added over the years, it's in danger of becoming the photographic equivalent of MySpace.

My experience with Flickr tonight notwithstanding, Flickr has remained fairly solid, and that very staidness may help buy time for Yahoo while it tries to figure out how to keep Flickr relevant. "Flickr is a reliable photo sharing and storage service," writes Tom Warren of The Verge, "but it could offer a lot more, potential that we'd like to see Yahoo invest more in."

I don't mind if Yahoo adds more features to Flickr or not; I'm happy with the way it is. I just hope they can at least get the upload screen to work right again.