We know that having limits on the total number of uploads you can contribute in any given week is a bummer. We hope this article explains why these limits are an essential part of Photo Friday.
First, what are these limits?
When you sign up you're given an initial quantity of 10 upload credits. Uploading a photo consumes a credit. That in turn reduces your balance of remaining credits.
Every week you'll be credited an additional amount of upload credits (typically 3 credits).
Unused credits accumulate (roll over). The maximum you can accumulate from the weekly automatic allocation is 10x your weekly allocation. If your weekly automatic allocation is 3 credits, you will reach the cap at 30 credits.
Deleting a photo will return an upload credit to you.
NOTE: It's possible to have a balance of credits that exceeds your 10x cap. This can happen if you've redeemed a special code that added additional upload credits to your balance. When your balance exceeds your cap, deleting photos will not increase your balance.
Some members may have different allocations, and it's entirely likely that we will recognize the history and contributions of some members by increasing their limits. Additionally, over time we will evaluate the costs and the member growth to determine where the limits should sit. They are not static, but they are essential to how we operate.
Why are there limits?
It comes down to managing costs to keep within our budget.
Photo Friday existed for nearly 14-years without offering photo sharing of any kind. While we always wanted to offer some form of photo sharing, we knew that the cost of it would be prohibitive. In recent years some of the costs dropped significantly, making it more affordable, but only if there were built-in limits to help control costs.
The internet today is dominated by several truly enormous photo sharing sites, all of them with massive companies behind them, offering essentially unlimited photo sharing.
Photo Friday is small and our budget is finite. We know we can't compete with the big guys on the terms they've established. So we're different. We want to be different, but we also have to be different.
We fundamentally believe that the internet doesn't have to be owned - or have its features determined - by only large corporations. While the behemoths compete to outpace each other on total member counts and capacity, we believe there's an intelligent way to operate even something as relatively sophisticated as a photo sharing site on a smaller budget. This is what we hope to show you Photo Friday is capable of doing.
When everyone on Photo Friday is similarly limited as to the total number of photos they can share within a given time span, we believe most members will end up sharing only their very best work. This, we wager, will translate into member pages filled with extraordinarily personal, high-quality images, each representing the very best effort from someone very much intent on sharing his or her work with you.
This we believe makes Photo Friday different, personal, more intimate, more enjoyable. That is our wager.