Last year, Flickr announced that it would no longer give 1 Tetrabyte of free space for users to upload their photos. They said they would delete all the photos in a user's account, leaving behind only 1000 photos.
At that time, I had in different accounts a total of more than 175000 photos. I made it a point to download all my photos and before the end of the year, I had completed what seemed to be an impossible task. What Flickr wanted me to do of course was to pay them US$50 a year for the liberty to upload as many pics as I wanted. But I was determined not to give them any business. I removed all my photos and downloaded them in quite a few different hard disks. I bought quite a few hard disks and in the end, I paid more than US$350 for the hard disks and several backups. You may say I could have got 7 years of free uploads if I had remained with Flickr. But if they could go back on their promise to provide 1 Tetrabyte of free space for photos, there is nothing to stop them from changing their mind again. And Flickr kept getting sold from one party to another. It was once owned by Yahoo which sold it to another party which sold it to SmugMug which is known for its intolerance of nudity. Flickr is far too unstable and the good thing about my hard disks is they are all mine.
Tumblr
Tumblr recently changed their mind about nudity. It used to be the most reliable blog provider when it came to photos that naturists wanted to post online. But they suddenly decided to be prudish and they made it impossible for viewers to view posts that contained nude photos. But no work was necessary in the transition period because Tumblr was not going to delete anything. They just disabled the sharing of such posts. The owner still has access to his material.
WordPress
The result of Tumblr's decision has a huge impact for some users of other service providers. I used to blog on WordPress. But the horrid thing about WordPress is they provide very limited space for the posting of media (which include photos). Because of that, all my photos on WordPress were uploaded on Tumblr and linked to WordPress. In fact most of my blog posts on WordPress were directly linked from my Tumblr posts. But when Tumblr became prudish and disabled all my posts that had nude photos, my WordPress blog was badly affected.
Blogspot or Blogger
This is the most reliable blog platform to use and it's what I'm using now. It's true that there was a time when Google wanted to remove all posts that had nudity. They changed their mind when they got negative feedback from users. The good thing about blogger is all my photos are stored on Google Photos. Posting photos in a blog is as easy as clicking a button. In one of my recent posts (the Review of 2018), I uploaded as many as 52 photos. That took me no more than a minute or two. I highly recommend Blogger.
Google Plus
This gave me a headache recently. I had a lot of posts in Google Plus and there were some that I wanted to save. Using their download feature doesn't help because the downloads were in a format that I couldn't open up. I found it easier to screen save the posts I wanted to keep which I did. It was a laborious task but I'm happy to say that I completed the task tonight. I took a picture of me working on the laptop screen capturing all the posts I wanted to keep and posting them onto Google Photos of course. This is my jubilant photo. I have completed all the work that I was put to because of these errant Internet giants. I tried to cover up the messiness of my study but the stack of papers which my chair was specially positioned to conceal could still be seen in the photo. Well-meaning friends have cautioned me not to reveal too much on this blog and I have made it a point to look carefully at my photos to see if too many unnecessary details of my personal life might inadvertently be disclosed. Haha
That was very helpful, thank you.
ReplyDeleteGlad you like it. I've been told many times to write less and to post more photos because this is my photo diary. But I think sometimes it's necessary to write a bit more if one wants to be comprehensive. And for this post, I do want to alert my readers to the closing down of Google Plus and of course Flickr (for the free users). Cheers, Lim
DeleteWonderful photo.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
DeleteI suppose as a last resort one could have one's own web site to host the photos. I suppose as long as the enemies of social nudity have rage, money and numbers on their side it will always be that way.
ReplyDeleteSo far, Google seems to be OK. There was a time when Google sent notices to all bloggers that it will remove posts that had nudity. I remember receiving such a notice. But a lot of bloggers who use Google's Blogger or BlogSpot protested and Google listened to us and backed down. That's the good thing about Google. It listens to its users. Google allows nudity on its blogs provided it is listed as containing 'mature' content.
DeleteThis is why I hang out on MeWe on the "Nature Without Limits" site. They have a no censorship policy.
ReplyDeleteAS long as the enemies of nudity have the rage, the money, and the numbers, I don't expect things to change.
MeWe is good. It allows nudity. I've been a member since May 2017. The other one that allows nudity is vk.com. It's a Russian site.
Delete