It’s been a frustrating week for me.
I discovered several days ago that my Flickr was suddenly not working. Now, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Flickr for a long time. It started when I opened my Flickr account – something I resisted for a while, because they required both a phone number AND a yahoo account.
I didn’t understand (and still don’t) the need for a phone number and I did NOT want to get a Yahoo account given all their privacy issues and data breeches. However, I finally caved and set it up.
I was happy with it and all went fine until Smug Mug bought Flickr. Now, I don’t know much about Smug Mug, but of course they made a bunch of changes.
They changed the number of photos you can post on a free account (completely understandable) and they wanted you to migrate away from your Yahoo account/login. Again, completely understandable.
Except I was absent for a while and I apparently missed the window to change my email/login for Flickr to something that isn’t Yahoo. So when I discovered I couldn’t log in, I couldn’t fix anything, because I don’t/didn’t/never have used my Yahoo account that was associated with Flickr.
I researched the issue and tried several different things to no avail, so I contacted their support. I stated my failure to log in and my inability to access the Yahoo email. I got a helpful reply – telling me to log into my Yahoo email and follow the link to update my Flickr.
So, since Flickr was sooo much help, I decided to just try and see if I could log into my Yahoo account. Maybe the password was a simple one?? I could try several I remembered and see??
Nope. Nothing worked. So I tried the ‘forgot password option.’ I couldn’t use the phone text option, because I haven’t had that number in literally years. I thought I was completely screwed and would just have to start over on Flickr. Which, likely, I would have just abandoned.
Thank goodness for past me, who thoughtfully linked a back-up email to that Yahoo account (something I generally don’t do, so past me was feeling super special that day!) and I was able to access that email to reset my Yahoo password, which in turn let me fix my Flickr login.
Whew! All fixed, right?
I wanted to avoid all this in the future, so I thought, I’ll just update my email on Flickr to my current email address and be done.
Not so fast.
For whatever reason, you cannot just ‘change’ or ‘update’ or even add a second/back-up email on Flickr.
If I want to do that, I have to contact Flickr support. You know, those people who were so helpful in the first place. In this day and age, what site doesn’t allow you to update your information? Especially email addresses?!
A Kat and A Mouse 