Flickr is trying to showcase itself as an alternative to Instagram by highlighting their policies which are favorable to the users of their platform.

The company has blogged about how they let their users choose their own license for their photos.

Flickr said:

We feel very strongly that sharing online shouldn’t mean giving up rights to your photos. Our Terms of Service clearly spell out that Flickr/Yahoo! doesn’t own the photos that you upload. In fact, when you upload to Flickr you set the kind of license that you want to apply to the photos, ‘All Rights Reserved’ is the default, or you can select one of the many flavors of Creative Commons licenses. The choice is yours and you maintain control over how your photo can be used by others. If you want to make your photo available for use by everybody in the world, license it using Getty Images, or to license it to a fancy magazine, it’s up to you.

But the fact remains, Flickr is no challenger to Instagram. The free account is very restrictive in nature. Your original photos are not accessible to you. In fact, you lose access to your own photos once you have upload more than 200 photos. You can also just upload 300MB of content per month through your account.

Flickr has a real opportunity here. They need to make the free account more useful. Remove the access restriction on older photos. Offer free sharing of photos meeting a certain file size. This is what Google offers with their Google+ platform. You get unlimited storage and access to your photos as long as they are less than 2048 pixels in width or length.