Apple has long been asso­ci­ated with the say­ing “it just works”. Well, some­times it appar­ently works a lit­tle too well, to the point of allow­ing users to delete their entire Flickr libraries in one fell swoop with­out really mean­ing to. Oops.

The prob­lem stems from the way Apple’s pop­u­lar iPhoto soft­ware is inte­grated with Flickr. Recent ver­sions of iPhoto allow users to sync spec­i­fied albums with Flickr, which means they can auto­mat­i­cally upload new pho­tos as soon as they import them into iPhoto from their cam­eras, and change their cap­tions for both at once. The prob­lem is that iPhoto treats this sync­ing very lit­er­ally: if you delete a photo from from of these synced albums on iPhoto, it doesn’t just remove it from the Set on Flickr  — it actu­ally deletes the photo from your Flickr account entirely.

iPhoto appar­ently informs users that when they stop shar­ing a photo album between iPhoto and Flickr, “The album no longer appears on Flickr, but the pho­tos remain in your [iPhoto] library.” The word­ing is both ambigu­ous (Apple could just mean it’s delet­ing the pho­tos from the Flickr set) and not nearly strong enough to sug­gest that it’s actu­ally delet­ing data. And plenty of peo­ple have made that mistake.

Over the last sev­eral weeks this has led to a num­ber of threads in Flickr’s help forum where some users are up in arms after acci­den­tally delet­ing hun­dreds of pho­tos at once.

Full story at: http://www.techcrunch.com/