When are images deleted?
When you upload an image, it is stored in your Image Library. From there, that images can be referenced by competitions and galleries using links to your image. The same image can be referenced by multiple organizations.
Your Image Library is not intended to be a storage location for members, except for images used in a Visual Pursuits organization. There is no feature to download images form your library.
Subscriptions to the Visual Pursuits service include a storage allocation for images used by the organization. This means that unused images are discarded to keep the storage from increasing unnecessarily.
If you upload an image and it is not referenced in a competition or gallery for any organization for 90 days, the full-size image is automatically deleted by the system. A thumbnail image will remain in the author's Image Library. The author can edit the image in their Image Library and upload a full size image again.
If a competition or gallery where an image is used is deleted, the full size image may get deleted after 90 days if it has no other references in any organization.
When a membership expires, there is no change to the author's Image Library. Existing images remain. Often authors will belong to multiple clubs and images can be used elsewhere.
If a member deletes their membership in your organization, no change is made to the author's Image Library or the images displayed by the organization.
If a member deletes their Visual Pursuits login:
- Membership in all organizations is deleted.
- All full size images are deleted, but thumbnail images will remain in competition entries.
Note that organization cannot delete user accounts. They can only delete membership.
Administrators can also "Release" references to full size images. This removes competition references to the full size images but retains references to thumbnail images. You would only do this on very old competitions, usually more than 5 years old. This is done with the "Release" button on a "Manage Competitions" page.
If full size image references are removed, the full size images will be deleted after 90 days if they have no other references.