Read This If You Follow Me On Flickr
So, along the way I ended up with two Flickr accounts. The reason being that back in 2020 when I decided I wanted to start using Flickr again, there was no way to change your profile/photostream URL, and I’d long since abandoned the handle I’d used on that original account where I have 7,000+ photos going back to 2005.
I’d resigned myself at the time to the fact that all but 1,000 of those photos would disappear from Flickr due to the purchase by SmugMug and the cap of 1,000 photos on free accounts, but recently when they’d mentioned that they still haven’t actually started deleting anything, I began wanting to preserve those 7,000+ photos. There’s no way in hell, however, that I could afford two Pro accounts, let alone how complicated it would be to afford just one.
They don’t, however, provide any way to merge accounts, so I couldn’t figure out what I was going to do.
In the end, they offered me a way out of the conundrum: I downloaded the 700+ photos from the newer account, upgraded the old account to Pro on the monthly plan, uploaded the newer photos to the old account, methodically went through recapturing descriptions and tags (in part using a private archive of some old blogging), at which point Flickr deleted the newer account, and then let me change the URL of the original account to the one I’d been using on the newer account. Until recently, I didn’t even have comments turned on in the newer account, so all I lost is views (which, who cares?) and some followers—but nearly all the people who follow the newer account also followed the original account.
At any rate, the point is this: if you’ve been following me on Flickr at that newer account, but never followed me back in the day at the original account, you’re going to lose me. So, go follow the original account (now using my preferred URL) if you want to continue following me there.
I’ll still have to figure out budgeting for the Pro level on that original account, as I definitely can’t afford to pay the annual cost, but for the time being, anyway, everything is up and working as it should be, and with so much of my blogging going back to around 1999 being offline, Flickr (minus my Instagram years) becomes the longest, deepest, and most consistent catalogue of my life in any form.