Here's one datapoint: I have 652,082 images in my account, and have downloaded my entire library a number of times using different 3rd party utilities. Haven't ever had an issue.

Even as someone who can shoot 1,000 shots in a day for a wedding easily... mind sharing, what/how you have over half a million shots of?

Most of them are screenshots uploaded via a script for an academic project.

> Also, good luck dowloading your whole photo collection from Flickr.

I periodically fire up an EC2 instance and do just that via the API.

> It may say unlimited, but only a fool would believe it. How many photos do you have uploaded anyway?

Unlike your average "unlimited" shared web hosting, I've yet to hear of a single person booted off Flickr for uploading too much (legit) stuff. Storage is cheap, and the folks paying $25 to upload a photo a month likely subsidize the really heavy users a little.

>>I periodically fire up an EC2 instance

That was point oc put forward: A normal human being won't bother setting up an S3 account.

No, but for them there are tons of exporter apps for Flickr they can run from THEIR computer.

In theory, yes. But there are a plentiful of Flickr users who grudgingly renew their Flickr account because they don't see any alternatives that includes porting their photos.

The solutions exist. But no one knows about them. I believe this is a big problem and we're baking data portability right into the service.

If Flickr had a big button that said, export all of your photos then I imagine people would.

And by export I don't mean download zip file. I mean move where your photos are stored without losing the benefits of having them "up in the cloud".