Oh dear… First of all my Pro Account expired last week (yes it’s been 2 years already!) and 90% of my photos have vanished!
“If you have more than 200 photos, only the most recent 200 are displayed.
Your photos are not removed from Flickr, only from the list of your photos.”
I chose to upload more than a hundred private “insurance photos” to the service a few weeks ago so most of my “200 photos” are taken up by photos that aren’t even public facing! That’s right searching my photos’ tagged Auckland now only shows a pitiful 3 photos and a bunch of ads!
Another hidden gotcha… “Note: If your free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be deleted.”
OUCH… I know other web mail services do this as well but picture this senario (unlikely I know)… You spend 2 years uploading GB’s of photos to Flickr (because you are shy you keep these all private) you are hit by a bus and knocked into a coma… while you are “asleep” your Pro account expires you wake up 4 months later with little memory of the past. Your friend reminds you that you upload your photos to flickr so you go back to flickr hoping to be automatically logged in and “relive” your life through your photos… instead “sorry your account has been deleted… bummer!”.
I actually jumped back into Flickr over the weekend to sign-up for another year… I was feeling a little bereaved but not enough to stop using the service.
When I hit the homepage I got this message…
“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.”
Bugger… Now I need to be counted as a Yahoo mail user as well! I guess it had to happen and we do the same with passport (Live ID) but up to now I have avoided it looks like I have to bring all of my 5 Old Skool flickr accounts over as well!
When are we as a community at large solve this “Attention Data” issue (yes I know MSFT is not without blame here as well).