Flickr is forcing all users to merge their Yahoo! accounts with their Flickr accounts. Old Skool Flickr users received an email on Wednesday night informing them of this change. They have until March 15 to comply with the new requirements.

The CEO of a competing service, Zoomr, saw this news as an opportunity to capitalize on change. He spammed Digg by submitting his own blog entry about the new requirements, spawning a bitch-fest on Digg. There’s a place in the Flickr forums to whine about the new changes as well.

I thought this story would go away, but I’ve seen it at Slashdot [link] and at ZDNet [link]. How is this news, folks? Old Skool users are not being “abandoned”. The user experience has changed very little, as described by Flickr [link].

As a former “Old Skool” user of Flickr with a Pro account, I was originally upset about the announcement as well. I made the change. Yes, it was a PITA generating a decent Yahoo! username, but after several attempts, I had one to my liking. Allow me to address some of the concerns Diggers have been presenting.

As inajeep on Digg points out, “Nothing else on your account or experience of Flickr changes: you can continue to have your FlickrMail and notifications sent to any email address at any domain and your screenname will remain the same.”

–(from the Flickr Mail sent to my Gmail account.)

So I made the switch, although grudgingly.

*AFTER THE MERGING OF MY YAHOO AND FLICKR ACCOUNTS*

1. My Flickr screename remained unchanged
2. All of my contacts continued to display (applies to friends/family as well)
3. I continued to display as a contact for those who have me listed as one of their contacts (applies to friends/family as well)
4. I can choose to have my primary email be through any provider I want, not necessarily my Yahoo! account
5. All of my Groups remained intact
6. All of the comments that I’ve made on others’ photos remained intact
7. Notes remained intact
8. Comments others have made on my photos remained intact
9. My Sets remained intact
10. My RSS feed did not change

In summary, as was promised by Flickr, my user experience has not changed.

The one thing that is an actual change, instead of just a change in the way things are done, is the new limit to the number of contacts and tags one may have. The number for contacts is 3,000. Each photo on Flickr can have a maximum of 75 tags.

As far as the contact limit,“* 300 people have more than 3,000 contacts (but this doesn’t mean they’re more popular than you)” (via the Flickr forum thread on this topic [link]). One gripe made by a gentleman who has almost 20,000 contacts was that lots of people want to see his photos. The easy answer is for them to subscribe to his RSS feed. No need for that many contacts.

And the tag limit? “Approximately 0.00156 % of photos on Flickr have more than 75 tags” (via the Flickr forum, again). This will force users to make more precise use of tags and will create a better overall user experience.

Flickr’s great for many reasons, and I’ve seen lots of artists who use Flickr to display their work. I’ll continue to use Flickr. I maintain two accounts, one to display my artwork, and the other for photos. My reasoning for this is that when I uploaded artwork to my main Flickr account, I found myself getting NIPSA’d. [definition]. Can’t have that.

My Flickr account for artwork can be found here [link].

My main Flickr account can be found here [link].

What is your opinion of the new Flickr requirements? Let me know in the comments.