So far it’s still looking good.
Yesterday I could reconnect Flickr to my Yahoo! account and everything seems to be there.
Until now, I only noticed one minor glitch: I can’t reorganize existing picture sets. Loading them in the Organize tab will only display an error message without loading the content of the set. As soon as I add a news photo the set counter begins at 1 again.
Community groups also do show some strange behavior. I can see the group membership on the photopage but the groups themselves had already removed the dead links during this week. My guess is, I’ll have to remove and add the pictures again from the photopage.
yesterday Thomas Hawk send me link to a little collage, he’d collected from the Flickr Help Forum
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/5416699710/ (CC-BY-NC) Thomas Hawk
” If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”
— Cardinal De RichelieuThere are over 12,000 threads that come up in the Flickr Help Forum for the search term “deleted” What is wrong with this picture?
Flickr users deserve due process before our accounts are deleted without warning.
I already knew I wasn’t the first user to be deleted and I’m really happy we all could create such a huge media response to force Flickr into actually recreating a deleted user account, and I am really, really thankful to everyone, who wrote something about this event or forwarded the news to others.
I can’t say this often enough: THANK YOU ALL!
But 12,000 “Deleted” threads on a user forum isn’t something to accept at all. My account with about 3.500 photos in it wasn’t that big, but I did some numbers of how long it would take me to restore only the organizational part of my account. Without the links, community discussions and contacts. After all I know project calculations, since this is part of my day job.
I estimated roughly an hour for each picture to upload, add tags, titles, geo information, descriptions, adding it to sets and groups. From my experience this number will vary, depending on the topic of the photo. In the end I came up with a total of 425 man days (8h work day, Mon-Fri), meaning it would have taken me almost 2 years if I had the time to spend 8h a day to recreate the account. And keep in mind, I still have to work at least 8h a day for my normal job.
Factoring this to the 10,000 oder 20,000 photos some of these people had in their accounts, it’s something you can’t repair at all. Spending more than 1 month to recreate your own account doesn’t make sense, even If you are a professional photographer, because you would be losing to much time you would normally be spending on earning money for a living.
It is actually good, that there now is a “proven” way to get this accounts back, but it still needs some work. It also came far too late. After all Flickr has been around for 6 years now. So if Yahoo! and Flickr really want to make me happy with their service again, they should start by implementing safe guard to avoid deleting user accounts “by accident” instead of giving everyone free Pro memberships.
Because honstly I didn’t actually pay for my Pro account over the last few months either. Receiving a free subscription is as easy as participating in some photography events, show up at meetings and photowalks, submit some of your work to competitions or visiting photography or web community related tradeshows. Talk to some people and here you are: 2-12 month free Flickr Pro subscription. Knowing this now I wonder if I would have actually paid for the first 4 years of my membership.