Flickr starts removing redundant photos from free accounts

Flickr will begin removing photos from free accounts on Tuesday, Feb. 5, if those accounts contain collections of more than 1,000 images. Users can download redundant photos or take a paid account.

As of Tuesday, users of the free version of the large collection photo service run the risk that Flickr will remove photos to reduce collections to the limit of 1,000 photos. The service starts by deleting the oldest photos and works from there to deleting newer photos.

Flickr announced in November last year that it was changing its offer. That announcement followed a takeover by photo sharing site SmugMug in April last year. Until November, free accounts had a terabyte for storing photos, but Flickr has since limited that to 1,000 photos. Users will not be able to exceed that number from January 8. The measure is intended to allow more customers to switch to a paid account. Customers of a $50 Pro account get unlimited storage.

Flickr offers the option to download photos as a bundle in a zip file, but the maximum is five hundred photos. Some users on the forum of the service indicate that this is going slowly or not at all, because many people are still busy at the last minute to secure their photo material. Some apps for exporting from Flickr, such as Gather and Adios for Flickr, have been responding to users’ desire to keep their photos since November.