That’s fine, but I felt mislead. The problem is that their terms of service require you to post a “linkback” any time you embed a photo hosted by Flickr into a blog or post one into a post to a web forum. About 99% of why I wanted an image hosting service was so that I could post images to forums like those at dpreview and other photo or hobby forums.

After years of putting photos onto Flickr, they changed their web interface. And when they did, it made it more obvious that they really didn’t want their users to be posting images into blogs or into forums. So they required that a link-back be posted with every photo. The idea being that people could click on that link and be brought to Flickr.

This was completely unexpected by me, and I’d never done this! Yet I had thousands of photos, and thousands of posts to various forums whose links would all “die” if I deleted all of my photos from Flickr.

I asked on their help forums if they might consider just charging a higher price per year for people who wanted to NOT put the “link-backs” with every photo they posted to a forum. The responses I got were rude and showed that they didn’t really care what the users wanted.

They said that when they found sites or forums with flickr-hosted photos that did not have the required “link-backs”, they’d block access to flickr from the offending sites. They mentioned a few sites that they’d blocked already.

I then brought up the fact that dpreview (the largest digital photography site and forums in the world) was riddled with hundreds of thousands (if not more) flickr-hosted images, and very few had “link-backs” mostly because almost nobody realizes that the link-backs are even required. I asked them if they were going to block dpreview. And I was ready to give them hundreds and hundreds of examples of images, currently being linked at dpreview, which did not have the required link-backs. Surely such a blatant violator as dpreview (via their millions of members) should be blocked!

But we all know how doing that would just enrage virtually everyone who uses the dpreview forums. So the point was that flickr was willing to have a rule and then enforce it selectively. I hate that. If you’ve got a rule, then it goes for everyone. If you don’t like the fallout from that rule, it’s time to reconsider.

But they just blew me off.

So the only answer for me was to find a real photo hosting site. I settled on Zenfolio, and have been extremely happy. They’re extremely professional. They have no silly hidden rules. They’re NOT a wannabe social networking site.

They’re a photo hosting site.

Anyhow, just something to consider if you’re thinking about using flickr. They’re not really a photo hosting site. They told me that directly.

I’m a SmugMug subscriber, but the one issue that keeps making me take a second look at Flickr is it’s ease of integration into WordPress and other blogging platforms.

I wish there were more ways to show my SmugMug pics off to friends and family by integrating the pics stored there into my pages and blog posts.

I’m hoping more developers will do that for SmugMug… or even that SmugMug will invest some time and cash into developing these tools for it’s own user base.

I think the important point, though, is that the vast majority of the population doesn’t know what to do with an API, but they do know what to do with smugmug’s Themes.

More people even know how to do basic HTML or CSS than know how to do useful things with an API, in fact.

Full disclosure: I work at smugmug. :)