Flickr: Seriously, Download Your Photos Before March 12 or Lose Them Forever
Thursday, February 7, 2019 IST
The good news is that Flickr has extended the deadline for users to download their images from its servers before it starts mass deleting photos. The bad news is that this is definitely still happening in mid-March, so really, really make it a priority this time if you want to save your stuff.
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“Based on feedback from our members and complications some members experienced when downloading photos yesterday, we’ve extended our deletion eligibility deadline until March 12, 2019,” the company told CNET in a statement on Wednesday.
The company said months ago that it planned to whittle free accounts down from a terabyte to only 1,000 images and delete the rest on Feb. 5. After that, if users wanted to post more photos to the site, they would have to purchase a Flickr Pro account that would run them $50 annually. Flickr announced these changes back in November as part of an overhaul to focus on paid subscriptions after it was purchased by SmugMug last year.
But despite giving users plenty of time to prepare for this massive photo purge, many were—hm, let’s say unprepared. The problem, which Gizmodo previously noted, is that there is no single button to do this in one fell swoop. Instead, users are tasked with downloading their photos in batches of 500—which you can imagine could be a real pain in the ass for anyone with several thousand or more images shared to the platform.
Some users also reported getting error messages while they were attempting to download their photos, which the company seemed to imply in its statement Wednesday was part of the reason it pushed the deadline back to March 12. Needless to say, some Flickr users seemed genuinely pleased to have another month to get this squared away.
For a step-by-step guide for how to download your photos, we’ve got you covered right here. But photo nerds, seriously, this is your last chance.
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