14 DAY TRIAL // Flickr has managed to restore the account of Mirco Wilhelm which had been mistakenly deleted and was deemed unrecoverable. It seems that there was something that Flickr and Yahoo could do after all and they managed to recover all of the lost images, comments and so on.
Flickr says that the account has been fully restored. Wilhem has confirmed that his account has been restored, though he was unable to log in yet.
"Yahoo! is pleased to share that the Flickr team has fully restored a member’s account that was mistakenly deleted yesterday," Yahoo said in a statement.
"We regret the human error that led to the mistake and have worked hard to rectify the situation, including reloading the entire photo portfolio and providing the member with 25 years of free Flickr Pro membership," it added.
"Flickr takes the trust of our members very seriously and we appreciate the patience shown by this member and our community. Flickr will also soon roll out functionality that will allow us to restore deleted accounts more easily in the future," it announced.
If you haven't been keeping up, a couple of days ago Flickr Pro user Mirco Wilhem realized that his account for five years had been deleted. He was a paying customer and had some 4,000 photos stored on Flickr.
He had no idea why Flickr would do this, but it turned out that the account had been mistakenly deleted after he filed a complaint about another user that had been using other people's photos.
A Flickr employee, however, deleted his account rather than the offending one. Flickr then contacted Wilhem and told him that it was unable to recover any of the data.
After plenty of coverage, though, Flickr said it would try to restore all of the photos, comments and so on. Now, it looks like it has managed to just that, though it didn't say exactly how. Even better, Flickr has finally realized that it needs to implement a way of disabling accounts without deleting all of the data.