Lift Flickr Pro upload quota?
So, as I keep hinting at, I’m thinking very seriously about moving my entire photo collection to Flickr. This weekend I e-mailed them and asked about the 1GB/mo upload quota as it applies to the Pro accounts. I wanted to know if this could be lifted for the first month because I have almost 5GB of photos and didn’t want to have to wait 5+ months to move everything over. Not an unfair request if you ask me, especially in light of the fact that I would be paying them. This was their response:
Flickr doesn’t have the ability to offer extra bandwidth
for an initial upload just yet. It may become something
that it offers in the future, for a fee, because bandwidth
costs money.
I don’t quite understand the logic here. First of all, I wouldn’t mind paying the fee given current bandwidth costs. Secondly, it’s not like I have 5GB of photos from a week’s worth of shooting — we’re talking about my entire collection (i.e., I won’t have 5GB of new photos every month). What difference does it make if I upload all of that in one month instead of five; the same amount of data is being sent across the pipe either way. I realize their provider caps them at some monthly maximum, but it seems that it would be in their best interest not to deter customers over something so petty and easily resolvable.
That said, my complaint is somewhat trivial and probably won’t be a deal-breaker for me. Truth is, the actual number of photos that I would make public would probably not go beyond those that are already on my site, and I’m pretty sure I could at least get all of those up there without crossing the bandwidth threshold. The thing with me is that if I’m going to move everything over I want to do it all at once, not spread it out over months. Like I said, it really is a minor issue but I thought some of you might want to be made aware of it before you threw down your cash.