Update: Rev Dan Catt from Flickr has un Nipsa’d this photograph.
[I am CEO of Zooomr]
For the fourth time in the past 2 days my images have disappeared from public search on Flickr. Best I can tell these images were marked NIPSA by Yahoo – Flickr.
NIPSA is a cowardly way that Yahoo removes your images from public search on Flickr. It is done in secret, behind your back, anonymously and you are not notified when it is done to you. For some people this means that their entire photostreams are removed from public search. For others it’s a few random images from their photostream. The thing is, you will never know if it’s been done to you or not. You might figure it out later on your own when trying to search for your photo but you won’t know when it happens to you.
Ask yourself this. Is this image offensive? It’s interesting that two of images marked NIPSA were images accompanied by a message critical of Yahoo.
Entire groups can be NIPSA’d on Flickr.
This very well may be the fifth image that Yahoo decides to NIPSA of mine. NIPSA sucks. NIPSA is wrong. Flickr should treat their paying customers better than this.
The problem with censorship is that in the end it usually only strengthens the power of your critics message.
If you do a search for TestingNIPSA you will find this single image (I suspect by the time you read this, this image also may be removed though).
www.flickr.com/search/?q=testingnipsa
And yet all of the urls below contain the same tag. Something needs to be done about this.
www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/419109430/
www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/419986620/
www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/420473563/
www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/419107007/
How many of your photos have been marked NIPSA?
Answer: You’ll never know.
Hey Thomas,
I’ll bet this has to do with the fact that, technically, this isn’t a photo.
We’ve gotten a lot of signups from people who take screenshots of WoW, or their web browser, or whatever and post them to Flickr so they can blog them… And Flickr comes down hard on them because they’re not photos.
I can’t say for certain whether they’ve closed accounts for this, but we’ve gotten complaints about photos being removed, and NIPSA is probably a gentler version of this same issue.
It may very well be in the Flickr ToS that you can only use photographs, I haven’t bothered to check.
Anyway, my 2 cents. Betcha Zooomr gets plenty of Flickr refugees who just want to blog their images, regardless of their photo content, too.
Don MacAskill
The only photo policy on Flickr is garbage. What do they care if I want to share a graphic I’ve made with my friends. The other day I was trying to upload a .gif to Yahoo! photos and they wouldn’t even support the file extension.
Flickr’s Stewart says:
“If you have philosophical, moral, political or aesthetic reasons that prohibit you from using Yahoo! products or services in good conscience, then you shouldn’t use Flickr.”
So, yeah, Stewart, people might have some objections to their personal data (and by personal, i mean photos of the interiors of their homes, their children, their families, addresses IP and otherwise, etc) being collected and disseminated whilly-nilly by all those wonderful people who share the Yahoo! dental plan with you.
And it’s not as if I’m not bent over a proverbial barrel here; Flickr’s message to me as a paying customer is clear: All that you’ve contributed to this community is ours, and if you want to keep it, do as we say. Or leave ALL of it behind.
TH, *please* give us a handy migration tool that moves all our photos and every piece of metadata you can to Zooomr.
I love Flickr – hate teh Yahoo!