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This guy seems sort of angry. Apparently, he says, Flickr deleted his paid account not once, but twice. - Thomas Hawk from Bookmarklet

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"Here is a picture I took of the letter "F" letter. I took it just hours after FLICKR SHUT DOWN YET ANOTHER ONE OF MY PRO ACCOUNTS WITH NO WARNING! Thank you flickr. Thank you for being such an awesome photosharing site. You are a gift to the worlds artists! And thank you for choosing what people should see! I'm glad people can't chose their art freely. Wouldn't that make the world... more... - Thomas Hawk

Cannot imagine why anyone would pay for a second Flickr account after having the first one deleted. I'd be completely done after the first time. - Karoli

You've got to admit though, at least his response is creative. - Thomas Hawk

Probably I'd switch to a different service - Brett Kelly

Looks like some moderators are getting a little paranoid and trigger-happy with the delete button. - Rene Wirtz

Love the response. I'd definitely go elsewhere, there are plenty of sites around and you can generate your own traffic. - Kenton

Hmm, there's always Zooomr, and the folks at 23 (http://www.23hq.com/), if anyone wants an alternative, although I don't know how long they'll stick around for. - Tyson Key

Rene, that's an understatement. It seems to be getting worse and worse. It sucks. Yes, there are alternative sites, but none with either the mass of community or richness in archive. I quit Flickr once over a censorship issue, but you come back in the end. It's too hard not to. It's like crack for photographers. Sad though that the censorship runs so rampant. And it sucks that people routinely are deleted so frequently without warning. - Thomas Hawk

If a particular deletion gets enough attention, Flickr usually just ends up calling it a "mistake," Still even "mistaken" deletions can't be restored over there. - Thomas Hawk

At least this guy seems to have at least somewhat a sense of humor about it. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas - love your statement Flickr is "like crack for photographers." - AWESOME! - Susan Beebe

Flickr is 1 step away from KGB mentality - ultra lame for a social photo site - Susan Beebe

I keep each photo that I post online (both to Flickr and Storm-Artists.net) on my local machine, so if my account gets deleted I'll be upset but at least I will still have my photos. But, it's pretty bad that the instant reaction to a possible violation is deleting an account, that is just premature, immature, irresponsible and very poor business practice. - Rene Wirtz

Exactly! They should disable NOT delete accounts - Susan Beebe

the problem isn't so much losing your photos. Hopefully nobody is stupid enough to put their only copy of their photos on *any* photosharing site. Although sadly some have been and have lost photos. The problem more though is that when you're deleted you lose so much of a social archive that went along with your photos. - Thomas Hawk

When Flickr nukes your account *everything* is gone. The social metadata around photos are significant. Whole conversations have happened in photo threads. Many, many are like blog posts. Truly creative collaboration can happen in interacting with photos. It's not just Flickr killing your stream. They kill everyone's interaction that ever touched your stream as well. - Thomas Hawk

When Flickr nukes you all of that is permanently erased. And even though there are tools to remove your photos off of their servers, there are no tools to salvage the metadata around photos. Even if they deleted the photos they should leave that in place. - Thomas Hawk

Think about some of the amazing threads we've seen on FF even in it's short life. And imagine if someone just came in and deleted all of someone's threads without warning. They're not just killing and punishing the person. They're punishing anyone who interacted in those threads. Many of these threads may seem stupid and even silly, but I believe that many threads also have important historical and archival value that we may not even realize today. - Thomas Hawk

I just realized that you could always use the Wayback Machine to get your photos. - Admiral Anika

Hmm, as far as I know, they don't embed the geotagging data into the metadata of the image files, so you've effectively lost it. - Tyson Key

A long explanation, but a bit on why I feel objecting to the censorship on Flickr is so important. - Thomas Hawk

Tyson that is why you should not use Flickr or any photo sharing site to geotag your photos. Do it yourself at the file level. I use Geotagger (free) and Google earth (free) on my Mac. Microsoft has a free geotagging program at their Pro Photo Tools page. Both of these are easier and faster than doing it on Flickr and *you* retain this data at the file level. - Thomas Hawk

All of the metadata is available via the API, isn't it? Regardless, losing all of the comments is an enormous loss of data in some cases, it seems baffling that a company owned by a search giant would be so willing to destroy data willy-nilly. - Tyler

Anika, I'm not sure that you can use the wayback machine. On many Flickr pages I've tried it in the past and it hasn't worked. I tried it on one of my photos that Flickr deleted a while back and for whatever reason it wouldn't work. Here's an example of one of my current photo pages not indexed by archive.org. http://web.archive.org/web... - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, You've had problems with Flickr before? I can't believe they would delete one of your photographs. They should consider it an honor that you even use their service! - Michael Fidler

Interesting Flickr fact and then I'll get off my soapbox. In the "Adult Flickr Members How Not To get Deleted" group (a group set up for the main reason of figuring out how *not* to get your account deleted off of Flickr), there are 17,664 members. That's a lot of people worried about getting deleted. - Thomas Hawk

In the forums and in Flickr Ideas all you see is referral back to the Community Guidelines and these are pretty vague, so basically this means that Flickr staff can do what they want. - Rene Wirtz

And you are right, it would be a waste and a shame to lose all the comments (human interactions) when account gets deleted. - Rene Wirtz

"You come back in the end. It's hard not to." Very true. With its massive user base of talented pro and amateur photographers, Flickr has a lot of weight to throw around when these issues come up. I wonder what level of vocal user frustration around Flickr's account deletion policies is enough to force them to implement an "undelete" administrative tool and step back to take an objective look at their process. Obviously the current level is not near enough. - Tom Harrison

Obviously undeleting a deleted account isn't as simple as creating the tool - it implies an investment of time and manpower to handle appeals. I suppose that means there needs to be at least two motivating factors: a viable competitor and enough paying members switching over to that competitor out of frustration in order to justify the investment in such an appeals process. - Tom Harrison

Usually hitting them where it hurts, the wallet, may help, but especially now you have to wonder if Flickr is really a moneymaker for Yahoo? And is it even core business for Yahoo going forward. They may not be motivated at all to really do something about it ... - Rene Wirtz

I really think that we flickr users with pro accounts should start a petition, after writing up some reasonable demands to yahoo about fair play. Because really, this is a yahoo company. - Paula W

I have no problem with a petition, but it still boggles my mind that Flickr/Yahoo is so incredibly arrogant about this policy. This is not brain surgery. Users have paid, and while Flickr retains the right to have the final say, there's no excuse for not allowing a paying customer to pick up their toys before Flickr tosses 'em in the trash, irretrievably. - Karoli

Oh wow - Nicholas Kreidberg

Eventually we'll move back to our hard drives. - Jordi Soler

Still don't understand why there is not for suspected offending users a blocking of all their photos being visible to everyone, freeze on messaging/commenting etc and an email dialogue with the user about the issue so that they have a chance to rememdy and resolve. Also why not a 3 strike rule where if they need to take this action 3 times its then a ban. - Rob Brammeld

What I find surprising is the fact that this profile with all the letters is still up... - Holger Eilhard

Flickr needs an ombudsman. - coldbrew

Scott, a suit wouldn't work. When you sign up for Flickr you basically say they can delete your account for anything that they want really. It's part of the TOS. You agree to it when you join. I guess in part it's just a hope that if eventually the issue got enough attention that they might budge. Maybe someday if/when Flickr has different ownership things might change. Yahoo obviously just doesn't care. I would think they'd care more about their reputation as censors but they do not seem to. Sadly. - Thomas Hawk

i left flickr some time ago - Oliver Hörold

I have come across to something similar with the biggest online art website, DeviantArt, where some admins couldn't resist going on powertrips and banning people left & right, just because they could. And from there I learnt there really is only one way to make them change: get a large group of people to not renew their subscription to hurt them in their pocketbook. If they don't hurt financially, it is nearly impossible to make changes. - Rene Wirtz

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