It came from Flickr this morning:

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

So Flickr has gone ahead and made Yahoo logins mandatory effective March 15th, on which date users whose accounts predate the acquisition will be required to merge their logins with a Yahoo account. I am very unhappy with this, but lacking a quick and easy way to transfer my photos, metadata, and photolog links to PicasaWeb, I will simply have to suck up and hope Yahoo logins work better than they used to.

(I really hate the “Old Skool” label, by the way. It sounds infantile and patronizing, and as we can see from this login requirement, doesn’t really indicate that they hold their classic members in high regard. But then, maybe that’s the point: to annoy non-Yahoo users into submission with puerile condescension.)

Official Flickr forum thread is here, in which Ludicorp staff patiently answer many user concerns. It looks like my main problem of intermittent Yahoo login is solved with a separate Flickr cookie. Privacy and intellectual property ownership issues abound, of course, and many of the anti-Yahoo sentiment seems to stem from a fuzzy feeling of “badness” about Flickr being more and more absorbed into a Monolithic BigCorp™. That’s not something I’m too worried about, though you may want to review my Brief History of Yahoo Acquisitions for a possible preview of what may happen to Flickr in the next decade or so.

More from Torrez, Binary Bonsai, Kottke, Anil, Strange Attractor, Don of SmugMug, ThomasHawk of Zooomr, Matthew Ingram, Scott Karp, Chris Messina, Blake Killian, Shelley Powers, Ken Camp, Chris O’Donnell, Jason Levine, Slashdot, BBC, and CNET.

(I would be a lot happier about this if the people at Yahoo would let me have the “brownpau”, name, especially seeing that whoever took it before me hasn’t updated for almost a decade now.)