But the photo sharing site has no future as a key tool in the journalism racket if it plans to keep acting the way it acted toward Shepherd Johnson last week. Johnson says the site deleted his paid account with no warning and wiped out over 1,000 photos, all without a formal explanation.

Johnson had posted several comments on photos in the official White House photostream that were critical of President Obama's support for suppressing torture photos. Someone -- probably someone from the White House charged with moderating comments -- deleted them. So Johnson posted some more comments, embedding an Abu Ghraib photo in one of them. Then he found his entire account zapped, and his photos gone.

A source who knows how Flickr works says that anyone viewing the site could have flagged Johnson's comments as abusive, and if enough flags are raised, a low-level worker somewhere deletes the account, photos included. It's a matter of an employee following instructions, with little judgment involved. Flickr keeps no backups. Any deletion is permanent.

Gawker reports that Johnson appealed to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, hoping Butterfield would step in and moderate the conversation between Johnson and Flickr VP for customer service Heather Champ, who had first told Johnson he'd been deleted for "spamming" the White House photostream, then, after some back and forth, had blocked him from sending her any more messages.

Butterfield told Johnson he's no longer involved with Flickr, but added that he'd known and worked with Champ for years, and: "If she's blocked you, it's because you're a dick."

That very well may be, but it's beside the point.

Here's the point: Flickr's policies in this area might be perfectly logical at every step of the way. Account-holders can moderate comments on their own photostreams. Users can flag abusive commenters. Flickr is in the photo-sharing, not the photo-storage, business, and does not back up the millions of images posted to the site.

But the way all that plays out in real life is that a photographer gets zapped for exercising his right to free speech and loses two years' worth of work.

This isn't going to work out for journalists. Should Johnson have backed up his photos? Sure. And eaten his broccoli while he was at it. But this is the real world. Johnson, like most Flickr users, I'd wager, trusted the site not to summarily delete his photos without any kind of warning because he'd rubbed enough of his fellow users the wrong way.

What if he weren't "a dick"? What if he were just a guy with an opinion that a certain bunch of people don't like -- abortions should be safe and legal, let's say, or John McCain would have been a better president than Barack Obama -- and that group organized to flag the hell out of him and get him booted?

I had just been thinking recently that I've fallen so far behind in curating and posting pictures of my kids to my personal blog that maybe I should just dump them onto Flickr. I'd have less control over the presentation, but it'd be easier and I could still write captions.

After the Johnson incident, I don't think I'm going to do that -- even though I back up every photo I upload to Flickr. If I were a real journalist taking important pictures, I wouldn't dream of doing it. I'd find a site that would host and display my photos with an assurance that those photos wouldn't disappear without warning.

And if there weren't such a site, I'd get to work creating one.

If Flickr is going to be a useful tool for the next generation of citizen journalists, it should not be deleting photos without warning. The worker has to have power over the tools, not the other way around.

If a user deserves to be banned, ban the user. But would it be prohibitively difficult to give that user, say, a 48-hour window to back up his or her photos if necessary, and to appeal the banishment, before the whole collection gets vaporized? A message to Yahoo, Flickr's corporate parent, asking that question was not returned.