Flickr plans to start deleting your photos

The new owners of the Flickr photo sharing website plan to begin deleting millions and millions of photos. 

The company, one of the earliest photo sharing sites, going back to 2004, announced on Nov. 1 a change in policy and a renewed push to get Flickr back on the radar. As of Feb. 5, it initially said it would no longer continue to offer 1 terabyte of storage for photos for free. The new rules: $50 a year for unlimited storage. The deadline has been moved up to March 12. 

Photo-sharing website SmugMug, which bought Flickr from Yahoo in 2018, gave users who didn't want to pay three months to delete their old photos. In January, it began declining to let anyone with over 1,000 photos upload new photos, unless they deleted or signed up for the Pro account. 

Andrew Stadlen, Flickr's vice-president of product, says he expects the deleting process to go on for months. "The accounts that haven’t been accessed in years will be the first to go," he says. "We'll be working from the back of the line."

Reaction

The reaction from members has been two-fold. Longtime users have been more engaged with the community and appreciate that SmugMug wants to revive the brand, he says, "Others didn't want to pay and have left. Not every single member is coming with us, and that's fair."

Stadlen would like you to sign up for a Pro membership, even though there are so many places to share photos online. 

The difference is that by sharing on Flickr, you're showcasing your photos to a "community of like-minded passionate people," which is a different social experience, he says. "People come together to discuss landscape, nature and other forms of photography."

(The pitch for SmugMug, which starts at $47 yearly and goes as high as $359 a year, is as a place to showcase your work, sell prints and run a photography website.)

How to clean up your Flickr

The first thing to know is that photos are presented in two ways, public and private. For instance, publicly, I'm sharing 251 photos. But privately, I had over 27,000. That massive number happened because Flickr used to invite people to upload everything from their memory cards and phones directly to Flickr. And since the storage rules were lax, we happily obliged.

To see the difference between public and private, click on the "YOU" section of your Photostream. 

The easiest way to start deleting is to go to the settings section of your account, and click on the "Your Flickr Data." Stadlen says Flickr will send back all your photos and comments, via a download. (We clicked the button Monday at 11:30 a.m. Pacific Time. It's been nearly 24 hours and we've yet to hear back from Flickr with a download. We'll get back to you on when the link arrives.)

You can also download piecemeal, but you can only download up to 500 photos at a time, and you get a zip file in return. The good news: they are returned to you in full resolution. The bad news--if you have 27,000 photos and can only download 500 at a time, that's a lot of clicks to endure. 

We spent two hours downloading Monday night, but didn't get the zip files returned to us until Tuesday morning, around 9 a.m. 

Another way to delete is through the piecemeal process, and get ready--this is even slower. You can select more than 500 photos, but once you click delete, you'll find yourself staring at the computer screen, waiting for the transaction to go through.

If time is more important to you, Flickr has a great sales pitch. Sign up for the $50 a year Pro plan, and you won't have to stare at the computer anymore, nor feel the need to delete.

Follow USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham (@jeffersongraham) on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.