Flickr Accidentally Deletes Mirco Wilhelm's Huge Photo Collection (UPDATED)

UPDATE 2 Flickr now confirms that Mirco Wilhelm's entire photo collection has been restored. You can view his Flickr portfolio here.

UPDATE 1 On Tuesday, Flickr contacted The Huffington Post with the following statement:

Yesterday, Flickr mistakenly deleted a member's account due to human error. Flickr takes user trust very seriously and we, like our users, take great pride in being able to take, post and share photos. Our teams are in touch with the member and are currently working hard to try to restore the contents of his account. In addition, we are providing the member with 25 years of free Flickr Pro membership. We are also actively working on a process that will allow us to easily restore deleted accounts and will roll this functionality out soon.

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Photoblogger Mirco Wilhelm claims photo sharing site Flickr accidentally deleted his collection of over 4,000 photographs. And they may be gone for good.

Wilhelm's Flickr account has been active for five years, and numerous websites have linked back to his photos during that time. "Those links will now point to deadspace," writes The New York Observer. "Additionally, the followers he had accumulated, tags, photo captions and copyright information have been wiped out and may not be restored."

How did this happen?

Wilhelm explained in a blog post on Tuesday that he recently contacted Flickr about another user, whom he suspected was posting "stolen material." During the investigation, Wilhelm believes that his account was deleted by a Flickr staffer, a mistake he says Flickr confirmed via email.

The following is an excerpt from Flickr's email response to Wilhelm:

Unfortunately, I have mixed up the accounts and accidentally deleted yours. I am terribly sorry for this grave error and hope that this mistake can be reconciled. Here is what I can do from here:

I can restore your account, although we will not be able to retrieve your photos. I know that there is a lot of history on your account--again, please accept my apology for my negligence. Once I restore your account, I will add four years of free Pro to make up for my error.

Wilhelm says that he was a paying customer, and that while the offer for free service "is kind of nice," it cannot make up for the loss of his large collection.

Comments

[snafu77]

05:10 PM on 02/03/2011

I'd say Flickr turned that face plant into a cartwheel. I still won't be using my Flickr account but at least they're trying.

On another note - 25 years is funny. Yahoo won't last 5. Remember Excite!? Anyone.......anyone....

[JackHoffman]

09:32 PM on 02/02/2011

My Kodak Instamatic needs a new flash bulb.

[suomynona]

08:54 PM on 02/02/2011

(Continued from previous post)

Flickr also needs to set limits for free users that don't use the site for anything other than bookmarking the photos that they are posting on other sites such as blogspot and tumblr. Flickr users that have never uploaded a single photo to flickr, yet have 20,000 "flickr favorites" that they will eventually save to their computer and re-upload to tumblr/blogspot/etc without giving credit to the photographer -- without text of any kind. Nice!

Unfortunately, there isn't another site out there with features or a collection quite like flickr, so there's no reason for flickr to make what should be very simple changes. Someday maybe Google will get around to it and turn Picasa into something better than flickr...

[suomynona]

08:53 PM on 02/02/2011

For those not understanding, this is more than just the photography that was lost. I spend hours tagging photos, adding locations and detailed descriptions to almost all of my photos. Plus, all of the comments people leave? Thankfully flickr WAS able to retrieve those as well...

Why did this happen? I'll give you one example. Tumblr users are allowed to repeatedly post thousands of other people's photography without giving any kind of credit, and tumblr does nothing to users repeated abuse other than to delete the copyrighted work. To date, I've had 745 of my photos removed from tumblr. It is sites like Tumblr that make me want to make my entire flickr account private/for friends only. But that would kind of defeat the purpose of having (and paying) for my flickr account.

Flickr should be more customizable in this aspect. It should allow the users that pay for the PRO account to decide whether sites like "beautyineverything.com" mirror entire accounts. As it is right now, it is either all or nothing with flickr and 3rd party sites. If you remove the ability for beautyineverything to mirror your entire flickr account -- then your photos won't show up on Google and other search engines.

Flickr also changed the default image size to a larger size, which was completely unnecessary -- other than for 13-year-olds on tumblr to steal people's work and post without credit in higher resolution. Thanks Flickr!

[Ninth Life]

07:23 PM on 02/02/2011

This is what happens to complainers at Flickr. They don't like having to do work. That's pretty obvious from the fact that after over five years of losing people's photos, they still fail to do back ups. The founder even lost his stuff. What's funny about Yahoo's Flickr is that they think they can pull off hosting a porn site, while pretending it's a family friendly place. That's not so good for an advertising platform, though. Major corporations have an issue with their ads being surreptitiously placed onto hardcore pornographic web pages. Yahoo's Flickr can play this game of hide-the-porn while tricking the general public into trusting them. But those lies don't really fly in the ad world on which Yahoo depends. Every day, people get deleted from Yahoo's Flickr as they desperately attempt to make their porn site not look like one. Copyright infringement is the same thing on a smaller scale. They know people steal content, that's why they place it all online in an easily accessible catalog of stock images. Make any kind complaint about the way they work, and you're gone. That's just the way it goes and Yahoo doesn't care one bit how you feel, because they obviously do whatever they want to. They push porn into grade schools unlabeled, give photos away for free to anyone without liability, and harbor countless sexual predators, whom they cloak so they're beside kids without anyone being suspicious. Can't see anything worthwhile about Flickr, or Yahoo.

[Oregonian76]

04:16 PM on 02/02/2011

Flickr doesn't back their site/content up? The images have to be stored somewhere; it's not as though the site is pointing to the user's hard drive.

Which still means the guy should have all his stuff backed up himself. Too bad that he lost all the pointers and links to other stuff... that's a risk you take when using an online service instead of hosting it yourself (and at 4,000 photos, he was in the realm where hosting himself should have been something he considered).

[Max Shaw]

03:39 PM on 02/02/2011

That sucks man...hope he had an external hardrive. I mean, you have to upload the pictures from somewhere. Hopefully he wasnt stupid enough to delete them afterwards...

[J0E1]

03:38 PM on 02/02/2011

I bet the guy he complained about had the last laugh lol.

[DrEnter]

02:29 PM on 02/02/2011

Flickr is a photo SHARING site, not a photo ARCHIVING site.

[OlskoolDem]

02:05 PM on 02/02/2011

flickr doesn't back up your photos, the shooter is /should be responcible for their own back up.
Flickr has over 1 million photo accounts with over 1 billion uploads a day.
time to get real pal.

[Alien Nation]

02:48 PM on 02/02/2011

If you aren't backing up your data and you run a site with a million users you need to get real pal.

[Mothball]

05:14 PM on 02/02/2011

he was a paying customer - that should include collection backup at a minimum - and sharing is only one aspect of what flickr is trying to be

[photoswarm]

01:19 PM on 02/02/2011

Try http://www.photoswarm.com. We won't delete your photos!

[mamadillo]

12:13 PM on 02/02/2011

I can't imagine entrusting anything of personal importance to someone else's care without making sure I had really good backup under my own control. We keep important photos and scans of all important legal or personal documents on hard media, with copies also kept by a family member. It's a little more work but a *lot* more peace of mind.

[Geffel]

11:24 AM on 02/02/2011

Hell's bells. I have 20,000 images on flickr. I would be sorely cheesed off if that happened to me. I'd want at least one free year of subscription per image.

[Vismortis]

12:49 PM on 02/02/2011

Uh you plan on living to see 20,000 years old?

[Geffel]

11:49 AM on 02/03/2011

I plan to leave my flickr account to future generations.

[any mouse]

10:54 AM on 02/02/2011

Isn't "Cloud Computing" a wonderful thing?

[Beamin1]

12:22 PM on 02/02/2011

Yeah just remember that where there's clouds there's normally rain....which means that in reality that cloud is sitting somewhere...could be in egypt or india or redmond or houston or charlotte or or or...you get the idea. and it's raining there, or a tornado or a hurricane or earthquake etc etc...the premise that the cloud is "safe" is false... and secure is pure myth.

This is really just one more way for people to pass responsibility for something on to somewhere else so that they don't have to do it....Always make hard copy backups.

[DXM]

10:47 AM on 02/02/2011

I find it difficult to believe that Flickr content isn't backed up somewhere. But if Micro Wilhelm is a paying customer for five years and all of his work from that time has been irretrievably wiped out, it sounds like the basis for a lawsuit. Conversely, it should be a lesson to all of us never to put all of our electronic eggs into one basket.