Thanks, but there's clearly more to it than that. They reference the full Flickr corpus in a number of places on the foundation's site and blog. e.g.:
>Flickr has grown into one of the biggest photo collections on Earth. It contains tens of billions of images from people all over the world, and keeps growing every day.
That’s why we’ve created the Flickr Foundation—an independent, community-focused organization. We’re committed to stewarding this cultural treasure for future generations, and fostering a visual commons we can all enjoy. [1]
And
>Today, the Flickr holds “tens of billions of images” documenting our planet from the first days of photography to just a moment ago. What if—should the ship go down—we had an archival copy of your Flickr presence ready? Simply admitting this might happen and preparing for it is a form of preservation. We call it a data lifeboat.
You have probably been affected by web services that go dark or disappear, often with little or no warning. We think that’s not good enough, especially for an archive as precious as Flickr (and your photos), so we want to design a better way.
It’s all at risk—though not in imminent danger—and that’s why the foundation has been set up. SmugMug has acknowledged the risk and set us the task of imagining and determining how to make sure this huge piece of human history doesn’t sink.
We will work initially with the smaller and openly-licensed subset of imagery held within the Flickr Commons. Using this collection as our baseline, we will explore the edges of what’s required to create a data lifeboat that’s transportable, buoyant, and robust.[2]
In the spirit of joining in on breaking HN guidelines, the page is broken with ublock origin blocking some shitty cookie popup. I could only read it in firefox reader mode, else it just dims out and locks the scroll with 'Hello World'.
But that doesn't really clear anything up. I see that there is a 501c that has been created, but it seems contrived to add value to flickr.com by offering some assurances that your photo collection doesn't slide into the abyss while offloading the storage costs. None of it seems
very charitable to me.
It is definitely the plan for the .com to continue as a commercial enterprise.
The .org is a new organization, a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. There's minority company representation on our Board, and we have all the official governance things like by-laws set up. The .com has funded the establishment of the .org to date, for which we are profoundly grateful, and we all expect and hope to diversify the .org revenue from now on.
Both parties are aware of, and working to ensure, that the .org can also be independent of the .com if and when it needs to be. We would like to avoid the risk of a new CEO coming in and shutting it all down, as we are witnessing now in other arenas!
"We have begun building an intersectional scholarly group involved in researching history, library science, gender studies, critical race theory, digital humanities, and archival practice."
I wonder if Flickr wants to create a corpus of CC content so that they can launch a competitor to unsplash. A separate non-profit entity to limit liability sounds like a smart move. Or maybe I'm reading a cynical motive when there isn't one :)
i don't think you need to read that far to find a cynical motive - they want to collect donations to pay for the continued hosting of the content of their for-profit website. isn't keeping content online just what flickr is supposed to do?
This is good news. They recently fixed the password issue too so I was able to finally access my account again after over ten years. I think I'll start adding to it.
I do! It had a great API, especially for 2004-2005. I remember after Yahoo! bought it, I went to SXSW and they were throwing an open bar somewhere and handing out Yahoo!, Upcoming, Flickr, and Del.icio.us swag. I still have and use a Flickr-themed travel microfiber cleaning cloth from that event.
Yeah, I don’t get it why people speak about it in past tense. It’s still a great service, it still has great content (better than any other TBH) and you’re not the product — it’s a service you pay for, and there are no ads.
Yeah, I was pretty heavily involved in the Toronto Flickr community when we used to meet for photowalks and big gatherings at bars. It was an incredibly vibrant community for a while. Such awesome folks to hang out with. I'm glad to see the site being preserved for the long haul.
“I was there Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago.”
Flickr was, I think, one of those "Web 2.0" thing. I got in a few months after it started. I remember a good friend who became sorta millionaire building tools for Flickr (I think he retired in the Himalayas or near it with his family). I remember him more vividly because his test account was my Flickr account - an account with enough photos not to choke his tool, and other test options. In turn, I learned quite a lot of photography skills.
Block inline scripts in uBlock Origin and the thing scrolls again, I just had to do this in Firefox (nightly, i.e. 109.0a1). You'll want to have 'I am an advanced user' enabled to be able to do this but then again you already have that enabled, don't you?
I recently uploaded my vacation photos to flickr, my first time using it. I have to say - very nice site / app. I uploaded 900+ full resolution photos for free. Way better than insta or facebook, two apps I use so seldom that they are not even on my phone. I will likely pay for the pro version, not bc I need it, but bc I would be happy to support the company.
But about twice per year, I think, "I should give Instagram a try again." Each time I try, it just comes across as loud and garish. And even if it weren't loud and garish, you can't really get a good look at high-res photos on Instagram. It takes me about 30 seconds to realize, "Oh yeah. Now I remember why I don't like Instagram."
I guess loud / garish / low-res is the price you pay for Instagram's huge popularity. I hope Flickr can find that happy medium of being popular enough to stay alive, but not so popular that it takes on the characteristics that make Instagram unseemly.
I'd drifted away and went back a year ago and all of my information was gone-- photos, groups, everything. Nothing of mine is there any more. No reason to go back.
It wasn't clear from the opening who wrote this announcement:
> In December 2020, Ben MacAskill (President and COO of SmugMug + Flickr) asked me to return to the fold to figure out how to revitalize the Flickr Commons program.
So my brain decided that it was Stewart Butterfield, announcing his next move after leaving Slack. But, no, the "me" was Executive Director George Oates.[1]
I'm really glad that George is involved in the project. She was part of the original Flickr team AFAIK. I worked for her at the Internet Archive and later for her startup Museum in a Box. Her particular blend of skills makes her ideal in these roles where there's conservation of digital assets with a social purpose involved.
On Safari macOS 13.0.1 with the usual AdBlocker, I cannot scroll past the splash. Something seems to be covering it.
Anyways, Flickr was a large part of my life when I started with Sony's point-n-shoot digital camera in early 2000s. I started Flickr in 2004 with the gifted pro account for signing up and left it in 2015. The last-ish photo is of the one I laugh out aloud (alone in the London Tube) -- a marketing design trying to say that buying tickets were so easy -- but to hone in on what the picture meant, they had to write - (piece of cake).
That Cookie popup doesn't event fit on my screen! And the buttons are below the fold. What's more I can't tell if "No" or "Yes" is selected, there's no visual identifier other than a slight colour differentiation which I struggle with.
I really think that Flickr has unrealised potential. One of the reasons photographers use Instagram is probably the ability to share their work with a wide enough audience and not just "photo-snobs". For years Instagram has been more or less hostile towards photographers, who just want to use the app for photo sharing.
Flickr, in my opinion has a wide enough base of people, generally interested in photography, to mirror some of the positive effects of sharing to Instagram.
It was no doubt better in the past. But there is still a lot of people on the platform and an okay amount of interaction.
In my opinion there is still a potential for rewamping the platform and make it even better.
Yep. Flickr does a lot of things right in comparison: holds onto and prominently displays camera metadata (EXIF), doesn't strip your color profile, allows uploading in wide gamuts to all clients (no sRGB conversion), doesn't compress the living hell out your photo, much more lenient on photo dimensions allowed to upload which is great for panoramas (not limited to square and squarish crops), allows editing not just the post data but also the license and the image itself after upload (maybe you realized it was darker than you thought and need to make a tweak), holds onto an original copy of the upload for archival reasons (I've used in a pinch when someone needed a hi-res copy and I wasn't attached to my NAS), and the, not to gatekeep, lack of everyday phone shots made the platform great to just browse by 'interestingness' and not being slapped with memes or influenerse or low-quality stuff for your friends but not a portfolio.
My first startup was in the early 2000s [1]. It was a photo sharing service and we hadn't even heard of Flickr though they were growing pretty quickly. They introduced some really cool features like tagging subjects in photos. Plus they had a really sweet animation of their logo while photos were loading over super slow connections.
Happy to see Flickr continue to find ways to live on.
Fun fact: Flickr started as a never ending web-based game where photos became a highly used feature. Similar to how Instagram came to be.
I just started using Flickr again, I've kept a pro account for years and years, as I didn't want to lose what I uploaded and forgot about. I wanted to share some photos from a holiday, I tried to upload an album on FB and it just didn't seem to be able to do it from the phone, madness.
I don't much use FB or instagram anymore, I go through instagram every so often,
when I don't check things for months, and I scroll a few times and it tells me I caught up! FB and Instagram are mostly just sponsored or commercial posts on my feed, instagram just stops showing stuff from friends after a few scrolls, FB is maybe 1 in 3 posts are from my friends.
I share an album from Flickr and people get an ad free view of what I wanted to share, far superior.
I have a collection of >500k historic transport photographs which I have collected over the past 25 years. Some my own, some are old photographs dating back to 1900 or earlier. All are categorised / tagged.
It concerns me what will happen to them when I am gone. At the moment I have a web site where they are hosted but I don't expect my children to be able to admin that once I am no longer here.
I would be more than happy to donate it all to Flickr Commons.
I would recommend Wikimedia Commons for pictures with expired copyright (taken before 1927).
And of course, it's possible to upload your own under open license, if you want to preserve them in that way. The most common is Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike.
If you reach out to donations@archive.org, they will assist you with coordinating logistics of donating your digital corpus to them, if interested (it can be as simple as shipping them a USB hard drive or two). Their team can ensure each artifact has an item created for it, with the metadata you have curated.
This is about erecting a tombstone for a service that spent years and years in a hospital bed - not even well enough to cough up blood. It doesn't make me excited. It makes me sad.
I gave up on Flickr this year.
Some time early next year I've had a Flickr Pro account for 20 years. For about 17-18 of those years, Flickr hasn't made much of an effort, and when I think about it, I'm a bit cross with myself for having given them my money for so long with so little in return. I should have stopped giving them my money more than a decade ago. And so should everyone else so that whoever has been in charge over the years got an actual incentive to get off their asses and do something about the site. To at least develop a vision that is something other than "let's coast for a couple of decades".
I know there have been attempts to revive it, but they have, at best, been anemic and episodic.
For the first 10 years I stayed there in order to keep in contact with all the people I had gotten to know in the first couple of years. In the brief period when Flickr was a good place to meet people also interested in photography. People gradually disappeared over that decade. Flickr became a ghost-town. I remember browsing it now and then to see who was still around.
The next decade I stayed on because I didn't want the photos I had uploaded to just vanish from the web. Which is a nonsense reason because I have all of the photos in my archive anyway, so I can just re-upload them somewhere else.
For me to come back to Flickr whoever owns it now has to demonstrate that they are serious about creating a photography site. It has to be fast, it has to be photography focused, it has to offer navigation/discovery that isn't slow and ugly and clumsy. And perhaps it has to also cater to the intersection between blogs and photography as a lot of the more interesting photography sites I follow now are really blogs.
The community that once existed is gone. It won't come back. People have moved on. That doesn't mean that there can't be a new community. But it takes some doing.
reply