Pixiq

The peeps over at Flickr thought it might be a good idea to reconfirm for users how their pictures are stored, what happens to them if your pro account expires, and who owns your photos. They’ve also just introduced a 90 day cooling off period in between account deletion and content erasing. So, without further ado, here’s a run-down

Your pictures (and their relevant data and comments and what-not) are stored on multiple servers scattered across the United States. Hopefully, if anything should go awry with one copy of an image on one server in one place, there’s a back-up copy of it waiting on another server in a different place. Good-o.

If you forget to renew your pro account, no fear, Flickr won’t erase your content. They’ll store your pictures and videos on their servers until you either do decide to renew or to delete your account. That’s reassuring.

Just to reiterate their clarification from two weeks ago, you own your photos and the rights to them. By default, all content is set to ‘All rights reserved’, but if you prefer to use Creative Commons, you can apply whichever version of that tickles your pickle.

And finally, if you decide to delete your account, Flickr has a 90 day cooling period when it keeps your content (but doesn’t make it visible), in case you change your mind. (Of course, that might also be in case they accidentally or arbitrarily delete someone’s account and need to restore it, which has been known… )

So now we now. And if you want to know even more, pop over to the Flickr blog.