Goodbye instagram & Thank you

...I hate to say goodbye to you but I won't accept your new terms. Sorry! I think there are other ways to make money than claiming "non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide" rights to all the content I post there. Plus I think instagram treated their useres very poorly by making them believe they reverted all their Terms of Use back to the old ones while truth is they only changed back one paragraph (and not the important one dealing with this license issue mentioned above!). I know this is a very common practice these days but this doesn't make it any better.

instagram states they do not claim ownership if their users' images...of course not! Because they simply don't need it! (According to Germany copyright law ownership or authorship can't be transfered anyway...) If they have all of these rights they can already do with our pictures whatever they want. Sell them. Use them for ads. Give them to their advertising clients. Publish them elsewhere. Sure chances are minimal that they use one my images. Or one of yours. But hey, if they don't use it anyway, why should I give away those rights to a company who cares about copyright only as long as they can make profit of it? Especially while there are other images services/apps our there which prove that things can also be handled differently...

What makes me sad and leaving really hard is that I have to leave behind many nice peolpe I met there. And I hope to see at least some of you again on Flickr, Twitter or elsewhere on the internet! But while saying goodbye to instagram is hard, coming back to Flickr feels familiar. It's good to be back in touch with some people I met there years ago...I still can't believe I joined Flickr back in 2005! This is almost 8 years! Plus they finally made an their new app which is AWESOME btw.!

Anyway, I edited all of my blog posts linking to instagram/statigram (silly me for ever linking there!!!) and re-uploaded all the images to blogger so that I won't lose any images here on my blog. And here I am all set to delete my instagram account in the following days still hesitating to press "Delete Account"...I also want to say thank you to the wonderful people I met there before I leave. I really loved being part of this community and seeing lots of amazing but also lots of very personal images! Thank you! Thank you for sharing your work. For letting me peek inside your life. For the conversations. And the inspiration. I will miss you!

My most-liked images on instagram...