Flickr today has announced a big change to its service that has left me baffled. On its company blog, Flickr says that it wanted to “reaffirm [their] commitment to the members of the Flickr community who wanted to know more about how people were sharing and engaging with their photos”

And how does Flickr plan to do that? Well,

The biggest change is that we are making the desktop Auto-Uploadr a Flickr Pro-only feature, giving Pro members exclusive access to the tool. This feature lets you effortlessly upload all of your photos from wherever they are being stored, while making them accessible from any device. If you are already a Pro member, you won’t see any changes to your existing subscription.

Flickr just yanked a tool that let its users upload more content to the service away from free users. Think about that for a moment. Flickr has already been in the dump lately, and now it has actively made it difficult for users to effectively the service. I fail to understand why it gives our tons of Free storage to users and then pulls a move like this.