This photo sharing website will delete your photos from today: Save them now, here is how

As part of its new policy, one of the oldest photo sharing platforms, Flickr will start deleting pictures of its users from Tuesday. The new policy was announced on November 1, in a bid to bring Flickr back on the radar. As part of this policy, the website will no longer offer 1 terabyte of storage for photos for free. The new rules mean that users will have to pay $50 a year for unlimited storage. The website was bought by SmugMug from Yahoo in 2018 and its users had three months to delete their old photos. 

In January this year, the website announced that users will not be able to upload more than 1,000 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 said. "We'll be working from the back of the line."

How to delete photos on Flickr?

Flickr presents photos in two ways: public and private. To list the pictures separately in both the categories, users need to click on the "YOU" section of Photostream. One way to delete the images is go to settings and click on "Your Flickr Data." Stadlen says Flickr will send back all your photos and comments, via a download.

The other way is piecemeal. For this, the users need to open the Camera Roll section from where they can select images and delete.

How to save pictures on Flickr?

1. Open flickr.com and login with your credentials.
2. Take the cursor on 'You' and click on Camera Roll section.
3. Click on Select All. You can save 500 images at one go.
4. Click on 'Download'.
5. Click on 'Create zip file'.
6. Download the file.

The company has, however, clarified that all photos shared under a Creative Commons license will remain active, even if the accounts that they came from had more than 1,000 photos. This means that large institutional library and government accounts that offer images in the public domain will remain unaffected.