Basil Loc: New Mexico

If there are any Flickr users here, maybe someone can suggest what might have happened to one of my photo sets recently. I had takes a bunch of pictures up at Angel Fire New Mexico at the BMX bike competition. I used iPhoto to "share" them to a set on Flickr. These pictures had been there for months, but this morning I went to look at them and all but one photograph had disappeared. Either I was hacked or I did something or have some setting that caused the pictures to vanish.

Anyone here who uses Flickr have any idea how such a thing might happen?

Phreedom Loc: Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

I don’t use Flickr but read this at Amateur Traveler on his photos that have similarly disappeared from Flickr:

http://amateurtraveler.com/photos-disappearing-from-flickr-when-the-cloud-fails/

“… The images were deleted from the Flickr account on December 24th 2009. From either the Organizer tool or from iPhoto.
If you have iPhoto and your Flickr account synced up, any image you delete from iPhoto is also deleted from your Flickr account.
Once an image has been deleted, it cannot be recovered.”

Read all the comments. You aren't alone.

Rongnongno Loc: FL

Thank you for this info. I do not use the service but it is good to know.

Giugly01 Loc: Woodstock, NY

Just goes to show that the best policy is to always back it all up.

jimmya Loc: Phoenix

I don't keep that many files on Flickr but I've never had the problem you describe. Could it be you over ran your space limit? If you did perhaps their system did a random delete on some of your files.

PeterM Loc: Scio, NY

I tried flickr briefly. I regard it as a social media dump site like FB rather than a photographic site. If your interest is to quickly move unedited snapshots so that friends can view them in one place, it probably works fine. Ditto if you want to sync the photo you just took with your cell phone or tablet. You'll find little security or customer support, but it's free. I don't think many on this forum use it, hence few responses.

If you are serious about displaying your pictures on-line, I recommend jalbum or similar services. Jalbum offers very good free software to produce albums, including watermarks, skins, and pw protection if you want to limit access to certain people. You can start for free and upload albums. For a small annual fee, you can reserve more webspace. Customer service is great and and pictures are secure. You also have the original album on your computer. You can view my work at www.knightscreekphot.jalbum.net - Peter

Basil Loc: New Mexico

I think I figured out what I did. I had uploaded the pictures in question while on the road, using my laptop (MacPro). I did, in fact, use iPhoto to upload them. Recently I decided I did not need all the photos I had on my Laptop as long as I had them on my main iMac, so, I deleted most of the pictures from my iPhoto on my MacBook Pro, including the Flickr photos. It was some time later that I tried to access these pictures using my iMac, but of course they were gone. I think by deleting them from my MacBook, sone that was the computer that I had uploaded then with, it also deleted them from my Flickr account sone, as opined out here, they are in sync.

The good news is, I have all the pictures still on my iMac in a separate folder, so I didm';t really loose anything.