Last November, photo-hosting site Flickr announced that it was going to slash the storage afforded to free accounts; they'd be capped at just 1,000 pictures each. Starting January 8 this year, free accounts with more than 1,000 pictures were rendered unable to upload any new images, and on February 5, the service was due to start deleting the excess images. Flickr intends to delete pictures working from the oldest to the newest until each account is brought under the threshold.

February 5 has come and gone, and so far nothing has been deleted. Deletion is still in the cards, but Flickr has extended its deadline to March 12, giving its users a few more weeks to rescue their pictures. The extension comes amid widespread difficulties with downloading pictures en masse from the site, especially among its very heaviest users. As Flickr's own help pages note, it can take as long as a week to package your pictures into a single downloadable ZIP file.

Alternatively, account holders can upgrade to Flickr Pro to safeguard their pictures.

The deletion plan has another important nuance for photographers that used Creative Commons licenses. Any photos uploaded before November 1, 2018, and licensed with a Creative Commons license will not be counted against the 1,000 picture limit. This means that Flickr won't be deleting the substantial number of pictures that have licensing policies more permissive than the default "all rights reserved" that would otherwise apply. All of the various Creative Commons license variants are covered by this exception.