Flickr will begin deleting old photos on February 5

Prepare your hard drives.

When Flickr came under new ownership in 2018, we knew changes were coming. Now, the day is here: If users have more than 1,000 photos stored on Flickr, this is the last chance to download the photos before Flickr could delete them, starting Tuesday, February 5.

Flick announced in November 2018 that it was creating tiered accounts: the free Flickr account, and the premium Flickr Pro, which costs $50 per year. While Flickr previously afforded its users with a freaking terabyte of photo storage, free accounts would be limited to 1,000 photos. That new policy went into effect on January 8. 

It also informed users that free account holders with more than 1,000 photos on the platform would be at risk of having their oldest photos deleted after February 5. Yikes!

Flickr has been periodically reminding its users about the coming changes, so this is no surprise. It published a blog post with important dates, including the coming February 5 potential purge. And it has placed a pop-up on Flickr users’ accounts, inviting them to learn more about Flickr Pro or “remind me later.”

That all sounds reasonable enough, right? 

The issue is that for some power users, Flickr has been a decade-plus long repository for memories and information. That means that power users could have much, much more than one thousand photos on the platform; one Mashable editor has over 150,000 photos stored on Flickr. And while the question of where to put all of those photos is easy enough to solve — an external hard drive, or reasonably priced iCloud storage, or, heck even spring for the $50 Flickr Pro — the process of downloading your photos isn’t the easiest.

If you want to do batch downloading of all of your photos, you’re limited to 500 at a time. You can also only download one album at a time. Plus, it’s a multi-step process: when you choose to download your items, you get sent a .zip file to your Flickr inbox, which you then have to click to download and store.

So what’s a Flickr power user to do? Go through each photo one by one and axe it, KonMari style, if it doesn’t bring you joy? Or let the years and memories get washed away like a grainy message in the sand? 

Flickr may not be a mass repository of years’ worth of memories for all or even most users. But as space and storage increasingly becomes something users must pay for, maybe the change can serve as a reminder that not every moment is worth capturing, and saving, forever.