A while ago, I wrote an extended post about how I was locked out of my original Flickr account. You can read it here.

What was especially galling about the whole thing was that, even though I’d started a new Flickr account to continue my use of the service, I never did use it very enthusiastically or regularly. That was because it made me unhappy every time I visited the site, just to know that my old account had been languishing there since September 2013.

And, oh, how those not-very-good 2013 Fleetwood Mac photos came to bug me, as the last things I posted in that account.

WELL.

New owners Smugmug have been emailing me over the past couple of months, informing me that I was about to lose my “Pro” privileges as they limit free accounts to 1000 uploads. So I tried, one last time, to email technical support and get some help.

And this time, I didn’t get a Yahoo robot, but an actual human being, who looked at the situation, clearly saw the match between (a) the two different accounts and (b) the email address attached to the locked account; and also (c) looked at my screen grab of all the corrupted Yahoo log-ins (dating from the 2013 hack of the service); and decided to help me out.

Reader, I’m back in.

I was so happy about this that I immediately paid for a “Pro” account for one year, so I could start uploading things again.

So for the past couple of days, I’ve been uploading pictures taken since 2013 into the once-dormant account. I’ve reached the end of 2014, the year I bought my little GM1 system camera. (I noticed also that I’d set the date and time wrong on that camera, so there were a lot more 2014 pictures than it initially appeared.) A lot of these had previously been uploaded into the sad secondary account, but I want everything in one place.

And it’s been fun, looking back at those far off days of 2014, the year of the heavy snow fall in France, the year of my youngest in braces and my oldest out of them. I will always be happy about my kids’ confident smiles. I tend to shoot candids, not a fan of the look people get on their faces when they’re posing, although there are a few portraits on there. I used to have quite the eye, but lack of practice means that I take fairly dull photos these days.

Flickr is still Flickr, of course. It’s slow at times, flaky, unreliable, with an awkward app experience. But the good news is that I long ago ceased to interact with others on the platform, and I don’t feel the need to comment or keep checking activity. Poignantly, the last ever comment on this account was, “Why you stop posting?” A question I couldn’t answer, because I was locked out.