Over two years ago Flickr Founder and former Chief Stewart Butterfield publicly posted that it was a "mistake" for Flickr not to have a mechanism to restore photos that had been deleted on Flickr. He made the comment in response to a photograph of mine that Flickr had censored that he said was not a mistake, adding though that not having a restore photo capability more broadly was in fact a "mistake" at Flickr. Last week there were several stories having to do with account deletions at Flickr. In one case a hacker had gotten a hold of a Flickr users credentials and deleted over 3,000 photos in a user’s photostream. Another case involved a professional photographer who had his entire stream nuked after being informed by Flickr that the reason for this was that he was posting other people’s photos (something the photographer, who had all of his images watermarked with his own copyright info, denies). Yet another case involved a Flickr user who apparently had some of his Flickr photos posted in an internet forum without containing links back to Flickr. In this last case Flickr agreed that it looked like "maybe the deletion wasn’t the right course of action," adding that the user was "lucky" that they were able to catch the account deletion due to a backlog of account deletion processings and then restoring his account and giving him four free years of Pro account status. - Thomas Hawk

crazy, really. Every technological process needs an "undo" button to account for human error, Flickr staff included. - Seth Anderson

I think the fact that they are not working on something that users think is so vital proves that Flickr is low rent. They will have an extremely low budget and any work that does not move towards better search (and therefore more income for Yahoo) goes completely out the window. It has been a long time since the purpose of Flickr was a photo sharing community. The purpose is now to take advantage of the user base's hard work. The only reason the community still exists at all is to keep users there - Chris Nixon

This does seem like a massive oversight on Yahoo/Flickr's part. I think Chris is likely correct that there isn't a lot of money going toward projects at Flickr. It (the site) works, and the community is self-sustaining; why mess with it? But the reality is: they really should have "undo". If they don't, another upstart will surely come along and gobble up there market share. - Denis Sweeney

And wouldn't you know it. Rather than actually answer the question as to why Flickr won't commit to an account recovery policy, Flickr staff simply provides yet another non-answer then locks the thread in order to silence criticism. Zack Sheppard (Flickr Staff) says: "Since the OPs issue has been resolved I'm going to close this down. We have left it open because there was obviously some concern about this and we wanted to let discussion keep going. There is a lot of food for thought here and thank you all for letting us know about your concerns. This is still the help forum though and because the OPs issue is resolved I think it's time to move on to the next." BAMM. Thread locked. http://www.flickr.com/help... - Thomas Hawk

How likely is the refusal to allow recovery of photos a legal decision. Once Flickr starts recovering lost photos, then they will be on the hook for all images for all accounts. This will transition them to a "back-up" service, not a sharing service. Seems to me they want to operate under a "no guarantees" policy. This allows them to keep their hands clean of liability. I smell lawyers. - Robert Kenney

Things like this are why I'm not moving "to the Cloud" - Robert Hafer from iPhone