I’m a lazy (and a lousy) photographer, so I may be the last user of Flickr to find out, but the free version will only display the most recent 100 photos you uploaded. The previous ones still reside on Flickr’s server farm, and they still are accessible if you do know their exact URL, but if you don’t you’re out of luck.

I just uploaded my 101st photo and my beloved Take 1 of my Next Action Balls project has disappeared (imagine one photo missing):

(if you have been here before – now you know what I’m up to besides rolling next action balls ;) )

This limitation obviously does not apply when you buy a pro account, but even if you do, once you stop renewing you fall back to the most recent 100 limit (leaving 12 gigs of photos behind each year, if you have been busy uploading) – see the Flickr Help.

So it’s probably a good idea to save the URLs of your photos whether you do have a pro account or not:

(1) click on a photo in your photostream to open the corresponding page:

(2) click on ‘all sizes’ to grab the photo’s URLs:

If you have a nice workflow for backing up those URLs, please let me know.