Phantom Pro
Flickr’s revamp has led to a bit of confusion about the future of the “Pro” membership, with some claiming that Pro memberships are going away, even for existing Pro users:
The upgrade screws many old pro users as it basically eliminates it totally. Pros had unlimited storage, unlimited photo uploads, unlimited video uploads, the ability to have their original images downloaded, the ability to replace a photo, and a statistics chart. And now that was all basically just taken out from under their feet.
That doesn’t appear to be the case, however. Since Flickr has implemented infinite scrolling on the site, it can be a bit hard to reach the footer where they link to their FAQ—it’s there, just tantalizingly out of reach. So here’s a link to the relevant section.
As far as I understand it:
- Flickr members who were Pro before May 20th can stay Pro if their account auto-renews.
- Pro members maintain the unlimited photo/video uploads, unlimited storage, and unlimited bandwidth benefits.
- The upload limits for Pro members are expanded to the limits for the new free accounts.
So, it looks like Pro memberships are supported, but only if you set your account to auto-renew. There is no longer any indication of membership level (which is fine, the “Pro” badge always seemed a bit unnecessary to me). Given that a yearly Pro membership is ~$25 and the ad-free Flickr account is ~$50, it would seem that any Pros still interested in using Flickr would just auto-renew.