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Flickr extends its deletion deadline to March after user outcry

Flickr extends its deletion deadline to March after user outcry

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You now have until March 12th to back up your images

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Last year, Flickr announced a new pricing plan: users would have to pay $50 for a Pro membership, or be limited to 1,000 images. Those users who opted not to pay and who were over the limit would have those additional images deleted by February 5th. Those users will have a bit more time: USA Today reports that Flickr is now saying it has extended the deletion deadline until March 12th.

Last year, rival site SmugMug acquired Flickr from Yahoo, saying it would leave it as a standalone community, and that it would get a bit more attention than Verizon / Oath gave it. The first big changes came back in November, when Flickr unveiled its new membership model: users would have until January 8th to upgrade to a $50 Pro account, and at that time, would not be permitted to upload any additional images if they had more than 1,000 images on the site.

On February 5th, those over-the-limit users who hadn’t upgraded and who hadn’t downloaded their archives would have their photos deleted, starting with their oldest ones. It was a serious downgrade from a service that previously offered up to 1TB of free storage.

SmugMug VP Scott Kinzie says that users’ complaints prompted them to extend the deadline, as users who were working to download their archives just prior to the deadline ran into some roadblocks: they could only download 500 images at a time and faced slow downloads, according to USA Today — a problem, especially if you’ve uploaded tens of thousands of images to the platform.