Flickr review

Flickr is an interesting combination of social media platform and cloud storage provider. Basically, it enables you to store your photo and video content online in a safe, secure manner. On top of this, it provides a medium for sharing your content with a large, photo- and video-centric community. 

In our search for the best cloud storage platforms, we decided to have a closer look at Flickr. In the rest of our Flickr review, we analyse every aspect of this popular platform and the tools it offers to help you decide whether it’s the right option for your needs.

Flickr review: plans and pricing

Flickr offers one free and one premium subscription option. The free plan allows you to upload and store up to 1000 photos and videos, with no total storage limit. However, you will be limited to 200MB per photo or 1GB per video. 

A Flickr Pro subscription unlocks unlimited storage, advanced statistics, and automatic backups. It costs $6.99 per month with monthly billing, $18.99 per three months, or $60 per year with annual billing. However, you will be constrained by the same 200MB and 1GB file size limits—which shouldn’t be a problem for photo uploads, but might end up being very limiting for those working with large video files. 

Now, Flickr is very cheap compared to most competitors, but it also doesn’t offer enough to cater to anyone more than a serious hobbyist. For example, Google Photos offers very similar cloud storage services, with 15GB of storage free and paid plans starting at just $1.99 per month. Alternatively, Dropbox is a highly professional option, with paid plans starting from $11.99 per month. 

Flickr review: features

Like most leading cloud storage platforms, Flickr comes with a great range of advanced integrations and notable features. Since it focuses on video and image content, most of these are directly related to visual media. 

Flickr Uploadr

The Flickr Auto-Uploadr is available with all Pro subscriptions. Basically, it’s designed to automatically upload and create a backup of all your photo and video content. New uploads are placed in a private folder that allows you to organize and share files as required. 

The Auto Uploadr can be used with a range of devices, including on iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac operating systems. It can also be configured to automatically sync files from third-party platforms such as Dropbox, iPhoto, Adobe Lightroom, and more.

Advanced statistics

Those who plan to share their photo and video files publicly will love Flickr’s advanced statistics tools. With a Pro plan, you will have access to advanced stats about everything from viewer numbers to your top posts, along with detailed information about how your audience is finding your content. 

To access your statistics portal, simply log in to your account, navigate to the Stats tab, and start exploring. 

Note that this feature isn’t relevant or important if you’re simply planning to store your media on the Flickr platform.

Image and video formats

Unfortunately, Flickr’s relatively constrained range of video and image formats will be a serious problem for some users. Only GIF, PNG, and JPEG photo formats are supported, and all other formats will be converted to JPEG when you upload them. 

There are more video file formats available, including MP4, MPEG, MOV, WMV, AVI, 3GP, OGV, OGG, and M2TS. Once again, though, there are plenty of noteworthy absences here.

Flickr review: interface

Flickr comes with a great web interface that’s extremely easy to use. To upload a media file, simply click the upload button on the top right corner of the dashboard and follow the prompts. Uploaded files can be organized into albums and galleries, and even posted to your public profile if you would like to share them. 

Meanwhile, you can access other users’ media via the Photostream tab, and you can even view a range of statistics via the Stats tab. 

Flickr review: security

Although Flickr certainly isn’t the most secure cloud storage provider, it still comes with the basic settings needed to protect your files online. For starters, you can specify a range of privacy settings to determine whether or not people can download, share, or find your files via public searches. 

At the same time, Flickr’s servers are protected by a range of advanced security integrations. If you just want to use the platform for pure cloud storage, simply set your files to private.

Flickr review: support

Unfortunately, Flickr’s support services aren’t nearly as good as they could be. All users can contact the support team via the online contact form, but there is a notable absence of live chat or phone support. In saying that, you can contact the support team via Flickr’s Twitter profile. 

Additionally, there is a selection of self-help resources, but they are neither as useful nor as plentiful as we would have liked. But at least there’s an active community forum that you can use to discuss problems.

Flickr review: cloud storage with social media

At the end of the day, Flickr lacks many of the advanced features other dedicated cloud storage platforms have. It certainly comes with more than enough tools to upload and store simple image and video files, but things like the small number of supported file formats and questionable security tools could worry some users. 

At the same time, support is quite limited. In saying that, though, Flickr’s Auto Uploadr is great, and the Pro plan comes in at a very competitive price. 

If you’re just looking for a neat, easy-to-use platform to store basic media content, Flickr could be the right choice. But if you want more advanced tools and support for numerous file formats, you will need to look elsewhere.

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