Why Marissa Mayer should close down Flickr?

I’ve used Flickr for years and with every passing year I felt the value of my “paid access” diminishing to the extent that this year I decided to give up my account.

I’m sure Flickr is providing some value to a handful of users, but I’m speaking from a common user’s perspective who seeks good service at a good price, with an important option to switch services if a better alternative comes along. So why did I use flickr in the first place. 3 simple reasons:

1. Share photos with my friends and family
2. Backup my photos on the internet so that I can still access them if my house is robbed
3. Access these photos with ease in any part of the world that has internet access

So what has changed since then?

1. Over time I found it easier to share photos with friends and family over social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
2. With cloud computing, there are full blown services that provide back and storage of your entire hard drive, making flickr an invaluable proposition with just its photos and videos.
3. I may not be an expert on this topic but I see accessing photos (or data) from cloud drives is much faster and easier for repetitive use. So for e.g. if I access a set of photos once from dropbox, it downloads on my device making it easier to reuse it while flickr would go back to the server every time I access a file.

Now elucidating a bit more on #2, if a customer rents a storage space, he is a legal owner of the goods stored in that space and should have the freedom to take it out anytime.  But flickr seems to think otherwise and has a one-way policy where once you get in you cannot get out. It is amazing business model but completely illegal is my view. So it kills my objective of using flickr as a backup if I cannot download back my files if for some unfortunate reasons I’m burgled of my hard drives and computers. 

I’m sure there are thousands of customers globally feeling cheated the same way I do, especially the loyal customers who have stuck to flickr over the myriad number of free services.

I’m not even talking about some of the other complaints that customers may have related to picture sizes, file types, mobile access etc which may be point of consideration for moving away from flickr, but I’m talking about the basic premise of a storage and photo-sharing site. So it is time to bid adieu to flickr forever with my farewell words “It was nice meeting you and I just wish you hadn’t ripped me off and we ended this relationship on a better note”

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own.