Oooops! Flickr sends five years' photos down the drain..

[ShyWriter]

Flickr sends five years' photos down the drain..

Emma Woollacott | Wed 2nd Feb 2011, 07:00 am

Flickr has admitted accidentally deleting a photo-blogger's account, wiping out his 4,000 photos at a stroke.

While Mirco Wilhelm of Switzerland has backup copies of the pictures themselves elsewhere, he's lost tags, captions and the like. And his collection had been widely linked - including from the Flickr and Yahoo blogs - links which now lead nowhere.

Wilhelm says the move seems to be connected to a report he made to Flickr a few days earlier about another user who was displaying material that was clearly stolen. But instead of deleting the fraudulent account, the company wiped Wilhelm's instead.

Flickr has promised to reinstate the five-year-old account, and offered four years - later increased to 25 - of free Pro as an apology.

"It is kind of nice, getting an additional four years of service subscription for free

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The story actually doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If Flickr had proper backups they would be able to fully restore the account and all links and permissions.