Flickr will only allow paying users to share nsfw photos

From now on, Flickr will only allow users with a paid Flickr Pro account to share nude photos and sexually explicit images. Anyone who posts photos as moderate or restricted as a free user risks removal of these images.

Alex Seville, CEO of Flickr, announces two policy changes of the photo sharing service. For example, only Flickr Pro users will be able to share images that have a restricted or moderate security level. flickr uses the security level moderate for images with ‘partial nudity such as breasts and buttocks’, and restricted for ‘frontal nudity and sexual acts’. Users can label their photos themselves so that Flickr can filter them as such.

The move also means that free accounts will no longer be able to share restricted or moderated images. Anyone who, as a free user, still has images with this security level, risks deletion of the files, Seville said. In addition, there will be a limit for non-public photos for free users. They can mark only 50 photos as private or make them available only to friends and family. According to Seville, the move will allow Flickr to maintain a public photo service while better targeting Pro customers.

Flickr has struggled for years to generate sufficient income. In 2018, the service was acquired by SmugMug. A year later, the company asked users to take out a paid subscription to keep their heads above water. Users with a free account can create collections of up to a thousand images; previously it was 1 terabyte.