Flickr is taken over, uh oh

Before Google Photos came along, my choice of photo and image backups had always been Flickr. At one point, I even subscribed to its 1 terrabyte worth of space just so that I can store my photos for posterity. As a result, my photo backup dated back to early 2000s when I started storing my engagement and wedding photos.

I still use Flickr now, mainly for my cross stitch patterns niche website.

I prefer hosting my images externally, because of my previous experience migrating web sites; for some reason every time I back up my sites, particularly on the images, a few got corrupted. That made me sad. Flickr's image embedding ensures that my images never expired from the server, unlike other free image hosting sites like Imgur and Photobucket -- I've not-so-great experience from them. By the way, try to avoid them at all cost, and use Giphy instead.

Earlier in the week, all Flickr users received a notice from the company about merging with SmugMug.

This puts me in a predicament -- will this merge mean that hotlinking my Flickr images would no longer be possible? Do I have to change the links to some 100+ images I have in my website to avoid image redirect errors? Moving them back to my server will take hard disk space, although I'm not exactly lacking of it. Still, this will mean heavier and longer backup loads.

Ah, the dilemma of self-managing my own servers. I hope whatever changes this merge causes will still give me ample time to decide the fate of my Flickr images. I'm already starting to copy over all my images from Flickr over to Google Photos. Thankfully, using mobile apps is making the transition slightly smooth, although no less tedious.

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