Attention early-2000s photographers, Flickr is going to start deleting your old photos beginning today, February 5.
OK, so the image and video hosting service is still being used by lots of current photographers as well, but it's the old photos you have on your account you need to worry about.
When SmugMug, another image and video hosting website, acquired Flickr last year, the two companies announced in November that free Flickr accounts would be limited to 1,000 photos. Flickr users previously were given one terabyte of space for their images and videos. However, prior to 2013, Flickr users with free accounts were only allowed to upload up to 200 photos.
The company justified the cap by pointing out that more than 97 percent of users with free accounts had fewer than 1,000 photos in storage while the overwhelming majority of pro accounts had more than 1,000.
So if you have more than 1,000 photos on your free Flickr account, you better move quickly to save anything you don't want deleted. But which accounts will be affected first?
According to
USA Today
, the process of deleting photos could go on for months. The company will start first with accounts that have been inactive the longest and then work their way forward. So if it's been years since you touched Flickr and you have more than 1,000 photos on your account, you should probably save any photos you don't want deleted.
If you're not sure where to start,
visit the Help Center page
for the easiest ways to mass download and save the photos on your account.
