If you deleted your embarrassing office Christmas party pictures out of Flickr but suddenly want to bring it up on the next corporate picnic, Flickr will now hang on to your erased pictures for three months.

Flickr's new updated policy about erased content saves your deleted pictures 90 days after you deleted them.

According to Flickr:

We've now instituted a 90 day delay in deleting the content, including the photos, metadata, comments, and all the bits of an account, after it's deleted. The data is no longer available publicly but it is kept on our servers, just in case you want to restore it. After that 'buffer' period, we erase it from our servers, ensuring your privacy.

Before this policy change, deleting pictures on Flickr meant they were lost forever. This new policy will keep it around for three months then it will be deleted. Users don't have to worry about any potential embarrassing pictures flooding the 'Net because they will be kept on secure servers and not shared publicly.

The company has also expanded its explanation of how they manage user data. According to Huffington Post report the company stores all photos and data in multiple locations with multiple copies. Users own all rights and ownership over their uploaded photos.

Flickr's new policy is good for users who need the extra wiggle room to decide if the picture they deleted was destined for the dust bin or the mantel on a shelf. To users who are paranoid about their deleted pictures floating in Flickr's servers this policy could be a source of annoyance and worry.