Flickr - WHAT THE FUCK?!

From Yahoo / Flickr’s helpful-delpful help page:

I have a free account. Some of my photos aren’t showing up. Why?

On a free account, Flickr limits the number of photos displayed. If you have fewer than 200 photos, we display them all. 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. If you blogged a photo and it no longer appears in your list, it will still appear on your blog, and the photo’s Flickr page will still work just fine. If some of your photos aren’t showing up, don’t panic! Just upload some fresh ones. Or upgrade to a Pro Account.

Note: If your free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be deleted.

So, here’s the deal - I’ve been a Flickr Pro user for 4 years now. I have tens of gigabytes of photos backed up to this site. When I first got a pro account, long before the Yahoo buyout, Flickr promised me my browsing / downloading of my own photos would always be unlimited. If my pro account ever lapsed, I could still browse and download my photos as much as I wanted, but my uploads would be throttled. That’s why I signed up for Flickr in the first place.

Now, only because my pro account lapsed, with no notification from Yahoo / Flickr, I find more than 90% of my photos to be inaccessable. I wanted to use one for a meeting this morning, and I can’t. All I can browse are my photos from Fanime, which aren’t very inspiring.

This is inexcusable. One of Flickr’s avowed purposes is as a backup site, but now I can’t trust them to make my pictures accessable when I need them. If I wanted to email an old friend a photo of my road trip from last year, how could I, now? I’d have to pay Yahoo more money than I already have, just to get access to the photos I’ve already uploaded to the site.

I’m immediately moving all my photos to Picasa Web Albums, and perhaps my own server as a backup, and Yahoo / Flickr will not get another dime. I’ll delete my account within the week.

Yahoo has completely ruined Flickr. Fuck you, Yahoo!