Flickr - Be very careful!!

[Horizon Property Group]

Dear all,

We have been using a Free Flickr account on our blog Horizon News for nearly a year. We were told that this was the best place to store pictures of the Canary Islands, Cape Verde Islands and our new developments for use on the blog and also in our Constant Contacts account.

We got to a point where we had reached the Free limit so we paid the fee to upgrade for 2 years. We then uploaded around 70 images so that we could add the photo plugin onto the blog site.

Two days later our Flickr account vanished, no warning or anything. I contacted Flickr via their website and eventually got a reply:- Flickr account "horizonnews" was deleted by Flickr staff for violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.

So I read their guidelines and could not see anyway that we had violated them so I contacted Flickr again as in their guidelines it states that any time you do violate them they will warn you, we had no warning the account and ALL our pictures just vanished. After nearly a week I got exactly the same reply back again.

Not very helpful. This also meant that pages of our blog site was missing images which we have had to go through and re add them via other methods.

So a warning to all of you that use Flickr, make sure that any images you upload you have backed up somewhere else in case they decide to do this to you as well.

[investland.eu]

I suggest everybody to have backups of everything. I mean here website, photo, offers, etc. Best stored on an external drive. I had problems with my pc and lost a lot of sensitive data...

[jessicatam]

Did you ever get a straight answer from Flickr? I'm curious because I use them, and have a premium account. I've had no trouble so far, but I did have similar problems with Youtube deleting videos that I had permission to post. I'm leaning towards hosting everything myself these days.

[david-giorgi]

Originally Posted by Horizon Property Group

...
We have been using a Free Flickr account on our blog Horizon News for nearly a year. We were told that this was the best place to store pictures...

I agree totally, and if you want to publish any information permanently under your own domain name please engage a reputable web designer / developer (such as myself

A reputable webhost will provide daily or weekly backups in case of problems

I can assist with online galleries or short term websites to promote properties.
Location: Annecy, France

[angelinalove]

I also want to know bcoz I do same for my domain.

[xHKx]

same here I do the same. Thanks 4 the advise

[deanver]

i'm glad i did not upgrade my account with them. i use multiply but i can't put it in my blogs. it's just that i can upload as many pictures as i can. i also have backups on my computer. and be sure to burn those pictures up on cds.

[Prop-erty]

Hi,

I read this with concern as that is part of our plan. Did it get resolved at all in the end?

[IanJ]

Flickr can be a real problem because they have lots of external moderators because the community is so large, easy to just get an idiot one who won't listen to reason, I had it happen too.
Better to just buy your own hosting.

[Prop-erty]

Originally Posted by IanJ

Flickr can be a real problem because they have lots of external moderators because the community is so large, easy to just get an idiot one who won't listen to reason, I had it happen too.
Better to just buy your own hosting.

The reason why we were attracted to Flickr is that it was supposed to improve our rankings SEO-wise. So now, it is rather confusing. Do we take the risk? What do you think?