Till sometime back, Flickr used the same image name with a suffix for all kinds of images. This included private images.

So, if you knew the file name of an image that is labeled private otherwise, you could have still guessed the name of the largest sized image which is otherwise not available to regular users.

Yahoo thankfully changed this glitch and now all the different sized versions of an image have different names.

Sadly, this also means that if you now change the privacy setting of an image on Flickr, the file names are changed. And if you have embedded that image on your blog before changing the privacy settings, that image would become dead and would show an error message.

This has happened to me and I am still not sure how many blog posts of mine are now showing dead images.

Yahoo should have put a warning alerting the user of this issue whenever the privacy settings of an image are changed. If they do, I did not notice it at my end…