If you don’t want to pay for the fee (or even if you do, but realize you’d like to have a local backup of your Flickr photos anyway) then you can use some easy to use Flickr tools to download all of your photos from the website to a computer. This essentially means that many dormant and long-forgotten Flickr accounts could have countless photos deleted from every non-paying account that is over the 1000 free storage photo limit, unless of course you pay for the $50 annual fee to continue to store more than 1000 photos online with Flickr. If you follow tech news, you may have learned that Flickr is going to now limit free user accounts to a total of 1000 photos.
Downloading all of your photos from Flickr can be desirable for many reasons, but it may be particularly important right now.