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Picryl (part of Getarchive.net) offers a search engine for images that are in the public domain. I tried using the free portion of their service, and thought that it would make it easier for me to find and download high resolution public domain
images. Picryl offers "upgrades" to the free membership that provide "Unlimited Original-Resolution Downloads and AI Upscales" for $7/month when paid annually. This sounded good to me, so I paid for a year of this upgrade.<br />
I started using the AI upscaler feature to download high resolution images. I downloaded 30 images with no issues. Then when I clicked to download my 31st image, a reCaptcha challenge popped up. I clicked through that and continued. But then the reCaptcha challenges kept popping up, and eventually they switched over to the "click all the images with buses" sort. The Picryl service was employing reCaptcha as a throttling mechanism to limit how many images I could download at one sitting.<br />
I sent their customer service a note and asked them why I was getting the reCaptcha challenges when I was using a paid account that was supposed to have "unlimited" downloads. After a couple days they replied, "We implemented reCaptcha to fight abuse." Huh? How can using a paid account entitled to "unlimited" downloads to download images be abuse?<br />
I wrote them again a couple of times arguing against the use of reCaptcha for users with paid accounts, but they refused to stop using it.<br />
In my view this is FALSE ADVERTISING. No matter whether you pay for an account, Picryl does not allow "unlimited" downloads as promised.<br />
Review date 2023-03-12 00:31:16
