I've been on flickr for a few years now and since Yahoo control of flickr there's been a few stupid things going on.

But this takes the cake, especially when it's done on a very high profile flickr member and have been a daily follower of her photos including the one in question which got deleted.

I'll let you guys read it.<ul><li><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/500072393/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/500072393/</a</li></ul>

They don't own the format do they? How does this play out?

Interesting that some outfit was selling her pics for $$$ and she seems to be the one paying for her reaction. I hope she at least sues their pants off and actually collects some retribu ... I mean compensation.

I'm a bit peeved by this as some recall, something similar happened to me, hence this has been occupying my time tonight and haven't started on dinner.

If you want to see the original post, see the cache at the link below, not sure how long it'll last.

Oh and do read the other side of the story, seems that OnlyDreemin was duped too.

<a href="http://www.rustylime.com/show_article.php?id=455">http://www.rustylime.com/show_article.php?id=455</a><ul><li><a href="http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Freb ba%2F497746041%2F&amp;fr=yfp-t-501&amp;toggle=1&amp;ei=UTF-8&amp;vc=&amp;fp_ip=GB&amp;u=www.flickr.com/photos/rebba/497746041/&amp;d=fPI_ZfmdOyJr&amp;icp

free speech is not a factor

It's a business and frankly of all people Tom should know that. Another case of emotion getting the better of him.

Unfortunately the culture at Flickr isn't what it used to be. Users need to adapt or go somewhere else. Isn't that why Tom is at Zooomr?

Oh and of course I think Yahoo made the wrong call, but "free speech" is not the right argument for this. Corporate responsibility is.

<a href="http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2007/05/15/flickr-_rebekka-availability-of-high-resolution-images-nightmare/">see my blog entry</a> Note the resources listed. Very key.

You still can on older images. A change was made probably 5-6 months ago where the filename for the original image is now completely unique. Before, it wasn't, it was just a matter of changing one letter to get at the original.

Unfortunately this change is NOT retroactive. Only photos added to flickr afterwards uses this new naming convention.

I was planning on uploading only a smaller version of my images but because of this change it does make it much much more difficult to find the original file, in fact I don't think you can, unless flickr has an API which can pull down the original file but I don't think that exists.

I emailed them about the whole after seeing the bug exposed on Digg several months ago. Someone was touting how to get free desktop images from Flickr. It was bad. I didn't realize they didn't make the bug fix retroactive.

AW reserves the right to delete posts for ANY REASON. I'm sure Flickr/Yahoo is no different. Granted, this is an ugly situation.

Personally, I AM in favor of watermarking high res images, or images that might be so universal that they might be 'stolen' when I place them on my sites. I see no reason to watermark anything under 1000 pixels wide generally, unless i'm submitting it to something other than my own site (and that includes images posted here for the most part, which are hosted on my own space.)

Let this be a case of make sure you watermark those high res images folks!

However there just isn't any good reason why flickr deleted that post to begin with, even Heather mentions it as a "mistake". Mistake of what? That's what a lot of people are still inquiring... or maybe it was just somebody hitting the wrong button (hey this does happen from time to time). Heather's latest response to this...

<i><b>At that point I'd call it an error in judgement, but that's not what Heather is saying.</b>

chadworthman, I'm sorry if I'm not being clear, but that's exactly what I'm saying. An error of judgement was made. I'm not saying a ham sandwich slipped from someone's fingers and oops, the photo's gone.

A mistake was made. The process (both human and possibly technical) will be changed to lessen the likelihood of similar errors being made in the future.

The team is very invested in the community and please believe me that we feel stuff like this very deeply. We don't take it lightly and changes will be made.</i>

NOw if it was for reasons where there were a lot of threatening comments that were out of line yes then I agree that they needed to do something.

This reminds me of digg where the AAC key was posted and it was promptly deleted, and for good reason mind you, however due to pressure from the online community, Kevin comes back and posts his comments on the reasoning why but elects to allow the community continue with the posts after all.

since they were the conduit, to HELP the person go after those who stole her images. also, we of course only hear one side of this story, like, how on earth did that shop manage to make prints from compressed JPGS that were worth ANYTHING in a sale? Seems a little odd to me. I've printed images from web sized images, they suck, even on great printers.

I went back to one of her old photos. Resolution in the original? 2000x1333, good enough for small prints.

that would easily make a nice 8x10, or bigger with the right printer.

It's unfortunate that the improvements that flickr did isn't retroactive, oh well.

Biggest my images are back then is 1280 across or 853 in height. But then my images back then are more or less garbage and more snaps :)

see my blog<ul><li><a href="http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2007/05/16/a-flickr-hack-rebekka-abuse-of-high-resolution-image/">Flickr Hack</a></li></ul>