flickr.com sucks

I joined flickr.com almost a year and a half ago. The account was a birthday present from my wife. I was really getting into taking photos and she knew that I would really enjoy having a place to share them with other people. At first I was just uploading photos of friends and places we visited but it soon became apparent to me that this would be a perfect place to share my many different obsessive collections with other people, or so I thought. Over the last year I spent way too many hours scanning and uploading images of magazines, books, 8-track tapes and various other things that I owned. I uploaded tons of photos of people that I know, places that I've been and things that I love. When my account was terminated by flickr I had just under 3000 images uploaded. I met many people on flickr that had the same interests as me, and through viewing their collections and having them add many of my photos as favorites I felt a little better about my obsessive collecting and even started to think that I might actually have some talent at taking interesting photographs. Hell, some of my photos were even found and used on various websites to illustrate articles. I really enjoyed looking at what my new friends and contacts had posted every day and looked forward to logging in and hopefully having some new comments on some of my photos.

Then last week I started getting notices from flickr that my account contained images that violated their policies. I responded to these notices inquiring as to what I had done wrong. I asked them to let me know what images they had a problem with. All I ever got back were automatically generated responses that listed the same policies and terms over and over but never answered my questions. I then found out that my account had been marked "unsafe". No reason was given for this and I had not been notified of this. I read through the policies and found where it said that it was very rare for an entire account to be marked as unsafe. Usually it would just be 1 or 2 images that were marked as such.

What had I done that was so horribly wrong and offensive to have my entire account marked "unsafe"? I still have no idea. Unlike many accounts on flickr I had no nudity whatsoever in any of my sets. I had posted one image that was a photo by Hunter S. Thompson of a naked woman sitting on a toilet wearing a Nixon mask. Once I started getting these notices from flickr I deleted that image from my account. The only vague description that I ever got about what I may have done wrong was a reference to posting photos that did not belong to me. Now I'll admit that I did have a handful of images in my account that I had taken from elsewhere, but none of these were photographs taken by another photographer that I had stolen. They were old photos of children dressed up for Halloween that I either found on the internet or bought at flea markets. I had also recently saved a bunch of photo images from an E-bay auction of a couple of brothers in the 1960's. I bought some of the photos but also saved all of the ones I didn't win on E-bay. I had started a set devoted to the Loo brothers, as I figured out that was their name, and it was incredibly popular on flickr.

Ok, it's getting late and I'm getting tired of typing so that's all for now. More tomorrow...