Flickr has made a number of changes to its platform in recent months. Just a few days ago, the company announced a new feature to join the modifications that were made to the photo-sharing platform recently, which is an “In Memorium” account status. The account status will apply to users who have passed away with an existing account on Flickr. This change accompanies the company’s notification that was made on the 1st of November 2018, stating that those photos that are licensed under public domain and Creative Commons licenses will not be affected by the reduction in upload limits for free accounts.
In 2018, Flickr announced that free accounts on the platform would soon be limited to a maximum of 1,000 media uploads. This would account for both photos and videos. The change was first set to be implemented in February 2019 but was later delayed until 12 March 2019. The platform announced that accounts with more than 1,000 uploads would have media that exceeds their limit deleted, starting from the oldest media that were uploaded in the account.
The company did announce that those photos and other media files with a Creative Commons license or a public domain license would not be removed from the platform. At the same time, the company removed the features that enabled users to change their entire photo library on the Flickr platform to such a license in bulk. This gave users the opportunity to go through their photo library and change the licenses one-by-one, depending on the value that the photo or video posted to them.
In a recent announcement made last week, Flickr once again mentioned a change to their policies, with the addition of a new “In Memorium” account status. This account status is being implemented specifically for user accounts belonging to a deceased individual. Media files that are present in such accounts will be set to public domain photos and videos, and will not risk deletion when the new policies of Flickr kick in.
The Flickr platform also announced that accounts with an “In Memorium” status that had a Pro subscription previously would continue to have the subscription status on their account.
Identified accounts set to “In Memorium” status will have a tag attached to their username that mentions the new status of the user’s account. Furthermore, the logins to these accounts will be locked, and no further access will be given to such an account.
At the moment, Flickr has not yet provided details of how they will be identifying accounts of deceased individuals. Further information should be released by the company behind this photo-sharing service in the future to help users understand how accounts can be reported as “deceased” for the company to put the account under investigation and possibly mark it with the new “In Memorium” status that has now been rolled out by the platform.
