Flickr Accidentally Deletes User’s 4,000 Photos

You don’t have to be a member of Flickr to experience the pain off of this one! Mirco Wilhelm, a devout Flickr user that has in total uploaded over 4,000 photos to the site, sent in a complaint to customer service about another user that was breaking the rules (publishing stolen photos). The next time Mirco visited his account at the popular photo-sharing site… it was gone.

That’s right… poor Mirco logged into a profile that no longer existed. There was no login, and of course, no 4,000+ photos. It turns out that customer service simply deleted the wrong account, and I use the word “simply” on purpose because of just how easy it can apparently happen. Even I on occasion have deleted something important by accident, but you’d imagine it’d be harder for Flicker.

Not so. Even though the company reinstated Mirco’s account, all of the photos he had uploaded were purged. In the case of most databases, once an account is deleted, it’s gone for good. Of course, it seems like Flickr didn’t have a backup plan in case something like this happened, so Mirco is in a bad spot where something he put a ton of effort into is just “gone”.

Being that most photographers I know keep good backup plans, hopefully Mirco didn’t actually lose all of his hard work. It does go to show that things like this can happen, though, and these services are not as bulletproof as they look.

“Unfortunately, I have mixed up the accounts and accidentally deleted yours. I am terribly sorry for this grave error,” the Flickr staff member wrote in an e-mail response to Wilhelm’s inquiry about his vanished account. “I can restore your account, although we will not be able to retrieve your photos.” Wilhelm posted the story to his blog, where it drew attention from Flickr users incredulous that the seven-year-old site doesn’t have a way to retrieve accidentally deleted data.