While I can understand your frustration, I also understand the frustration of photographers and other creators trying to make a living who have their work stolen. Their anger was wrongly directed at you, but it is a real problem.
My app didn't let you search by keyword, only by user. Further it didn't remove watermarks or do anything else. If photographers put their photos on flickr and they care about stealing they usually both watermark and only put relatively low-res versions there and you have to pay them for high res versions.
If flickr provided logs that showed bulk download and further some proof that even with bulk download that it was actually affecting professional photographers and not just a few geeks collecting some pictures they liked then I'd be more inclined to buy into their ban but without that I'm pretty confident the ban had no basis in reality.
It is only when you re-publish the photos that it becomes theft of intellectual property.
After all that's what the "property" in "intellectual property" is - the bundle of exclusive rights. Owners of those rights aren't deprived of them by somebody copying the works over which the rights exist.
Also, if you don't want something downloaded, don't post it on the Internet in the first place. The problem you're talking about isn't that photos get downloaded, it's how those photos are subsequently used.
I would argue that recognizing the reason that useful tools are taken down, even if you argue that reason is not legitimate, is an important part of figuring out how to stop those tools from being taken down.
> Also, if you don't want something downloaded, don't post it on the Internet in the first place.
I understand the argument although I do wish photographers could be free to post their work without fear of others taking it.
Newspapers will routinely rip off photos from social media, sometimes in the face of explicit non permission.