Should We be Worried?

I use Flickr to host all of my pictures.  All of them.  More than 6,000 of them are viewable to people I give "family" level access to.  More than 13,500 are public.  I do not generate a lot of traffic, I probably average a few hits a day, but that's not what I want from my account.  I want a place where I can host an unlimited number of files in a somewhat organized way, and I want most of those files to be available for me to display on other sites.  Sites like Blogger, for instance.  I also want the ability to upload and edit large batches of files at a time.  For the last 2+ years I have been willing to pay a small amount of money for those services.

Prior to buying a Pro account on Flickr I was using Picasa Online.  It did most of what I wanted, but even if I had purchased additional storage capacity I was never going to even come close to being able to host an unlimited number of files.  I was actually posting to 4-5 different Picasa accounts at the same time.

So I moved all of my stuff to Flickr.  I have been very happy with the service.  I haven't had a single complaint in over two years.  It's been great.

But is that about to change?

Flickr is owned by Yahoo, and Yahoo is looking like the corporate equivalent of a sloppy mess right now.  Their Chairman fired their CEO over the phone while she was at a conference.  She followed that by going to the press and dropping some eff bombs and referring to the Chairman as a doofus.  They started a relationship with a new company... I think it was a marketing firm, but I'm not sure.  This new company immediately recommended that a number of board members resign, and suggested if they don't they should be canned.

Until very recently I don't think I noticed a single new feature being added to the site.  That changed when they brought in Lightbox not too long ago.  I thought that was a waste of space when I first used it on my laptop, but it's really cool on an iPad.  I'll give them credit for that.  Still though... Flickr almost seems like an afterthought to Yahoo.

So Yahoo is looking bad, and Flickr seems like a forgotten project...

What am I going to do if Yahoo collapses?  Or cuts Flickr?  Or eliminates the unlimited storage?  Or sells Flickr (or all of Yahoo for that matter) to another company who guts the services?

Who is my back-up plan?

Answer:  No one.  At least not at the moment.  I have most of my account backed up.  Only the most recent sets and a big chunk of iPhone related stuff are missing from my back-up folder.  That's easy enough to fix, but as for hosting it all in the event of a collapse?  I haven't a clue.

Should I be worried?