Flickr is bringing back its Pro subscription plan. Besides a “Pro” badge next to your name, subscribers get better analytics, no ads to clutter the experience, and discounts. The new Pro subscription costs $50 a year or $6 a month. The reintroduction could well be aimed toward professional photographers.
Along with 1TB of storage, users have access to “new and improved stats, including improved navigation for viewing data on your photos, providing better insight on your most popular and impactful photos,” Flickr writes on its blog. If you enjoy looking at figures, Internet traffic, and charts (or you just want to see how popular a photo is), you can geek out with this feature.
Pro users get a 20-percent discount on a yearly membership to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan ($10 a month). Plus, they get free shipping on merchandise ordered through Flickr, such as wall art.
When Flickr introduced 1TB storage for all users in 2013, it phased out its old Pro subscription plan. Existing Pro users could still renew every year, but Flickr stopped offering new subscriptions (it did introduce new pricing tiers, like an ad-free subscription). The one feature that the new Pro subscription doesn’t bring, however, is unlimited storage – one reason why users continued to subscribe to the old plan, which also has no bandwidth or size limits, and lets users easily replace photos.
The good news for old Pro subscribers: Not only do they get the new features and keep the old ones (unlimited storage, most importantly), they get to keep the old pricing. It’s only for two years, though.
Flickr was once the king of photo management services, but many users have defected to competing services. Since Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took over, Flick has seen several upgrades. We’re not certain if the new Pro features, at this asking price, will bring in users. Without unlimited storage, we aren’t sure how appealing Flickr Pro would be to users like professional photographers. As it is, we hope Flickr continues to add additional benefits to the new Pro subscription that will make it even more attractive.
