Flickr, the legacy online photo sharing site, was set to start deleting members' photos Tuesday, but it announced a deadline extension to March 12.

Anyone with over 1,000 photos would have to pay $50 for unlimited storage, and that new policy still stands. Flickr says server issues and customer complaints pushed it to give people more time to download and delete.

"Based on feedback from our members and complications some members experienced when downloading photos Monday, ... we’ve decided to extend our deletion eligibility deadline," says Scott Kinzie, vice president of SmugMug, which owns Flickr.

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Talking Tech worked diligently to download and delete Monday night, but the servers were for the most part unresponsive for downloads and very slow for deletes.

Flickr is allowing people to download their photos, but only 500 at a time. (That's a problem for us heavy users. We found 27,000 photos that had been stored on Flickr through the years, mostly due to an automatic upload from the phone and camera feature Flickr had touted. Our colleague Michelle Maltais had even more, over 50,000 images.)

The download request produces a zip file with the photos sent back from Flickr. There is a master download everything button, but it takes many, many hours to generate the file.

We made the request Monday at 11:30 a.m., and nearly 48 hours later on Wednesday, the file has yet to arrive.

"Our goal has been to ensure that Flickr members have ample time to make an informed decision as to how they can best continue to protect and enjoy their photos on Flickr," says Kinzie. "Our foremost priority is to be certain that every Flickr member is aware that photographs may be at risk for deletion if they are stored in a Flickr Free account that has more than 1,000 photos."

Whether Flickr members, which at one time were touted as over 100 million strong, chose to stay with the free version or pay, "We hope this extension gives them the time to make the best decision around how they would like to protect and enjoy their photos," Kinzie says.

Flickr started out independently in 2004 and then was purchased in 2005 by Yahoo, which had left it dormant for several years. Photo site SmugMug, which targets pro photographers as a place to sell photos and run their websites, bought Flickr in April 2018 and announced the new policies on Nov. 1.

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