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Comment by deftnerd | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they landed on the "deleting oldest content first" format. The oldest items are the ones less likely to be backed up by users.

They had lots of options, including removing original quality images and just keeping resized images, archiving the photos off-platform and charging users to restore them from the archive, or deleting the photos that had the least views.

Not sure which, if any of those, might be a better option, but the one they went with has lots of downsides too.

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I agree. Back when Flickr was independent, you could upload as many images as you liked, but only the freshest 200 were visible. Your idea of offlining them and bringing images back when you become a paying customer sounds reasonable to me. I hope they heed your advice.

Would be a bit of a "hostage" situation, without really solving their storage problem. If an owner never decides to pay, for how long would they store the hidden photos?

Indeed. They're not doing this to extort money out of people, they're doing it to cut down their storage costs. Archiving doesn't make any sense at all.

It seems that way, but to me it would be better than the hard approach of iretrievably deleting your stuff. It’s not hostage in any case, they’re not threatening deletion, it’s more like DoS. I prefer that so that if i want to, I can pay, but if I don’t i still have an archive of my items to download for myself—it’s just others won’t see your items.

Eh, bulk offline storage is so cheap it's practically free, especially when you can immediately delete all the different cached thumbnails and other intermediate sizes from your CDN. As long as it's "become a paying customer and restore your archive within 24 hours", it would work out fine.

This. Cold/Frozen storage is incredibly cheap if properly setup.

I believe this may run afoul of some data retention regulations. E.g. GDPR requires a minimum of data to be retained: https://www.dpnetwork.org.uk/gdpr-data-retention-guide/

It doesn't. GDPR applies to personal data, which photos are not (most of the time).

As long as you have an active user account on Flickr the contract / terms of use apply with regard to retention of photos, which Flickr can probably change as per their previous ToS that you accepted when signing up.

And users have the right to request their data at any time and also request it be purged. These two premises add lots of process overhead to an otherwise innocent looking law from the outside.

I'm not sure why the downvotes. A lot of photos on Flickr have GPS information encoded. (And of course the photos themselves can often be connected to individuals through either their metadata or facial recognition.) Photos can absolutely be personal information.

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