The development team behind Flickr, the Yahoo!-owned online photo management and sharing application, has recently reassured users that all their data and photos are safe with Flickr. The data and photos are safe because Flickr has several policies and systems in place meant to prevent any unwanted accidents.

One policy is meant to assure you that once you upload photos to Flickr, they remain YOURS. You retain all the rights and ownership of any photo you upload to Flickr; by default, any photo you upload to Flickr is set to “All Rights Reserved”. IF you want to, you can change the license type and let others use your image.

Another policy applies to what happens when your Flickr account is deleted or when your Flickr Pro account expires. When you delete your Flickr account, your data is not deleted right away, it is kept for 90 days. In case you change your mind and want your account back, all your data is restored. If you don’t change your mind, everything will be deleted after 90 days. Please note that during this 90-day period your data is no longer publicly available; it’s still there in case you change your mind.

When your Flickr Pro account expires, nothing is deleted either. All your data is kept safe and secure until your decide to delete it. When you renew your Pro account, everything will be right there waiting for you.

Flickr also has a system in place that is mean to ensure that your data will never be lost. Flickr Senior Community Manager at Yahoo!, Zack Sheppard, explains: “When you upload a photo, Flickr creates multiple copies of it, along with any data on tags, groups or sets you specified on upload. All of that information is stored in multiple locations on multiple machines across the United States.”