Recently, I jumped on the Flickr bandwagon, and signed up for a pro account.  $24.95 a year, and it offers you unlimited photo and video upload, plus all of the great community benefits of being a part of Flickr.  It’s a great service, with a great community, at a great price.  I was using my Flickr account for my personal/business use, I setup the name under dpitMedia (which is my parent company).  I created a few collections of sets that made sense for each site I had.

The collection for Carbon Fiber Gear had a bunch of stuff in it, including the pictures of products we sell that I had personally taken.  In the descriptions to each product I would just put that it was available on my site, and I linked to it.  I’ve seen this done a million times on Flickr, find any company that posts pictures of their products, and they’ll more than likely have a link to their site…or bloggers, that have a link to their blog.

So I probably had around 1,000 pictures in my account, and out of that, maybe 50 or less were pictures of the products that I took with a link in the description.  One day I login to my account, and it won’t work.  I try to access my photostream, and it just says “dpit Media is no longer active on Flickr”.  I had no idea, why, so I tried to contact Flickr to find out what happened.  I sent a message on the contact form to find out what happened (Flickr doesn’t have a phone number listed anywhere, so I was forced to e-mail).  This was the response I got:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Flickr Customer Care.

Flickr account “dpit Media” was deleted by Flickr staff for violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.

www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

Flickr reserves the right to terminate your account without warning at any time.

Regards,
Do

That’s it.  There was nothing about what had actually been done, no information on if I was going to get refunded, etc.  I went through the Flickr guidelines link Do sent, and could only find one thing that could potentially be the reason why my account was terminated:

Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes.
Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr technologies (including APIs, FlickrMail, etc), or Flickr accounts must be approved by Flickr. For more information on leveraging Flickr APIs, please see our Services page. If you have other open questions about commercial usage of Flickr, please feel free to contact us.

Some of the pictures I had could have been borderline selling a product, because I posted a link to where you can actually get the product…but I don’t know if that’s what they really mean by that term.  If I post a picture of a Nissan Maxima, and then put a link to Nissan’s product page, am I violating the terms?   I could easily find 10 examples without trying that would technically break that term…but is it enough, or even what they mean, to actually terminate an account?  I would think they are just protecting themselves against obvious spammers, not somebody who very obviously is not spamming.

So I sent an e-mail back:

Hi Do,

I’m assuming it was terminated due to using it for commercial purposes…as I had some sets in one of the collections that were linking to the product that it was a picture of.

I apologize, and must have overlooked that clause in the terms when signing up. I wish that Flickr had at least sent a warning (even though I understand you reserve the right to terminate the account at any time), I would have simply removed the link to the product in those pictures. Out of maybe the 1,000 or pictures I had, I would say that 50 of them were like that.

Is there anything I can do to have my account reinstated? Now that I understand this term, it will surely not be broken on my end again. I had just upgraded to a pro account, I really loved being a part of the Flickr community, and I’d hate to lose that over a small overlooking on my end. I had been promoting my pictures from my own personal blog, and had no intention of violating any terms.

Let me know if there is anything that can be done. At the very least, am I getting a prorated refund of what I paid? I would much prefer to be able to continue to be a part of the Flickr community, and will not violate any of the terms going forward, it was an honest mistake on my part.

Thanks,
Dave

It has now been 48 hours, and I have yet to get a response from “Do”.  At the very least I have a right to understand why my account was terminated right?  I never got a warning from Flickr saying “hey, you’re violating our terms on some of your pictures, you’ll need to fix this or we’ll have to delete your account”.  Nope, they just deleted the account.  That doesn’t seem like a very good way to retain customers, or provide good customer relations/service.  Last I heard in the market news, Yahoo wasn’t exactly in the position to just throw money away.

Last week, my credit card bill came in, and the charge for setting up Flickr had a toll free phone number next to it (866-562-7228 for those that want it).  I gave it a call, and it actually goes to what I guess is Yahoo paid services billing support.  I get somebody on the line and explain my situation.  The guy basically tells me that there is no notes on my account to show why it was deleted, but that once it’s deleted, it’s gone forever (makes sense from a privacy perspective…sucks for me though).  If I wanted to know why it was terminated, I’d have to e-mail back (which I did, and have yet to get a response).  He was also able to give me a refund (100%).  He recommended I find out why I got terminated, and setup a new account, and don’t do whatever I did wrong again.

So I setup a new account (find me here, and friend me!), and started to setup all the pictures again.  It’s not going to be as much as I had before, but it’s a work in progress.  Really sucks from my part because I spent a lot of time getting everything right, tagging hundreds of pictures, adding descriptions, etc.  Yahoo/Flickr, please make sure and tell me if I’m doing some sort of minor break of your terms, and give me an opportunity to resolve it before just going out and deleting it.  If Flickr wasn’t so awesome, you’d have lost me a customer…but because your service is so good, you have another chance.

Anybody else have similar stories?  Doesn’t necessarily have to be Flickr.