Flickr can’t survive much longer unless you pay up.

In an email to users, SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill says Flickr needs free users to sign up for Flickr Pro as soon as possible or Flickr could shut down in 2020.

SmugMug acquired Flickr from Yahoo in 2018. “We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow,” MacAskill writes. “Unlike platforms like Facebook, we didn’t buy it to invade your privacy and sell your data. We bought it because we love photographers, we love photography, and we believe Flickr deserves not only to live on but thrive.”

MacAskill touts the improvements SmugMug has made to Flickr: hiring more support staff, ditching the Yahoo login, and moving photos to Amazon Web Services (AWS). “As a result, pages are already 20 percent faster and photos load 30 percent more quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down.”

But while “hundreds of thousands of loyal Flickr members stepped up and joined Flickr Pro [and] it’s losing a lot less money than it was…it’s not yet making enough.”

Flickr Pro will set you back $5.99 per month for unlimited, ad-free storage, statistics, and desktop backups. Commit to a year and pay $4.17 per month (currently $3.12). Use promotional code 25in2019(Opens in a new window) before Jan. 1 to get 25 percent off.

The free, ad-supported tier limits people to 1,000 photos; earlier this year, Flickr deleted photos from the accounts of people who exceeded that limit.

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