Jessamyn emailed with Michael Rhode, the Archivist at U. S. Navy Medicine who manages the organization’s Flickr account on Flickr Commons to talk about how they’ve been using Flickr to find new audiences and post historical and current images.

Navy Medicine has been a Flickr Commons member since 2011. What made you interested in becoming a member?

I had previously been the archivist of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and started posting photos for its Otis Historical Archives. The staff were asked to post their favorite photograph that they found when cataloguing and scanning images that week. BoingBoing mentioned the site, and our hits blew up. So, when I joined Navy Medicine, I looked at reinvigorating their Flickr account. The thought of unlimited storage to share US Navy medical images at no cost with a wide audience was perfect. In the past, the annual fees had always been difficult to get approved.

We’re looking at opening The Commons to new members in 2024. What information, tools, and processes did you need when you began? Have they changed over time?

I find the Commons to be pretty intuitive, but that’s possibly because I personally have been a long-time Flickr user. I think most public-facing collections will understand the advantages offered. I do not have any special processes beyond tracking the images in a spreadsheet. I also have a spreadsheet capturing our daily viewership numbers.

How do you determine what you want to upload? Has this changed over time?

Originally, the account was set up by our public affairs department and was used to highlight events in Navy Medicine, often at the headquarters level. It was an opportunity to highlight Navy Medicine Sailors and the work they do in support of the military’s missions…

When the historian’s department was merged into the overarching Communications division, I asked if I could start using the account. I was posting historical images for years, including a ‘this day in Navy medicine’ photograph.

COVID-19 changed all that. I began working from home and wasn’t scanning historical images at work anymore. I pivoted to trying to capture covid images from Navy medicine around the globe. From finding that material, it was a simple thing to then begin posting any images that Navy Medicine released across what we refer to as ‘the enterprise.’ After Covid waned, I still had subscriptions to all the feeds from various locations and units, so I’ve continued posting more current items than historical ones, especially when I was physically co-located with my colleagues a year ago.

What challenges did you face?

A major challenge was, and is, finding interesting material. A lot of photographs taken these days are promotion or retirement ceremonies and may have a more limited viewership than a war-time picture of a Hospital Corpsman patching up a wounded Marine on an island in the Pacific. The images still have a purpose, but are less likely to break through to a broader public.

What kinds of positive results have you had? (And, any negative ones?)

We haven’t had any negative results that I’ve seen. Positively, a lot of people are seeing various aspects of Navy Medicine, and what some of their taxes pay for. It’s especially useful to sharing to a different community than the one that is reached by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) which is where I collect a lot of images from. They’re usually only reaching people in the service or reporters.

Our Flickr site reaches anyone interested in Navy Medicine and its history.

Do you have any particular photo that has a story behind it, either in the photo itself, how it was used, what sort of community reaction you got, or something else?

Particular photo? That’s a tough one. This is our most-viewed image…

…and I have no idea why it is. It’s a pretty basic shot with almost no information, but has over 10,000 views ahead of the next most popular one.

Here’s one – the standard photograph of the World War II raising a flag on Iwo Jima is well known and the basis for a statue near Arlington Cemetery. But other images were taken, and this is one of them…

…and a Navy Hospital Corpsman was at the event.

Or you could look at this image…

…the site of the present day Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, with the National Institutes of Health across the street, and marvel at how empty it was in 1941.

Or on a personal level, see our predecessors in the history office 80 years ago here…

Especially for the historical photographs, there are so many stories behind them!

I was wondering if you had any thoughts to how the “no known copyright restrictions” license works (or doesn’t work) for the sort of content you’re sharing.

From our point of view, these are US Government work products and as such, are in the public domain. Copyright isn’t a consideration for them.

I notice you tend to curate your collections into albums often (we just did a blog post about albums and galleries so this is fresh in my mind). What goes into your process for doing this? Do you only do it when you upload or do you sometimes go back and arrange images for other purposes?

Photos go into albums when being uploaded, although new albums are created on an as-needed basis. As a military organization, we’re fairly structured compared to other institutions, so it’s easy to put material into categories such as Corps (Medical, Dental, Nurse etc) or Facility (hospitals, bases, etc), or Ships (hospital ships, ships staffed with medical personnel, ships visited by medical personnel). Then I can refer the person who needs historical images of Naval Hospital Bremerton to one place for their research.

I rarely go back and re-arrange images into new albums partly because with 23,000 images, it’s a lot of work. So we have three Nurse Corps albums now, and two were created before I took over managing the collection, but I just add new photographs to all three. Someday I’ll combine them all into one, but it’s not high on my list. I do enjoy seeing when someone favors an image or adds it into a new album or gallery though. I check the little alarm icon every day, and am frequently surprised. A 1948 shot of a Nurse bowling gets galleried a lot (although I think she might be playing duckpins).

• See more of Navy Medicine’s Collection on Flickr Commons.

You can also check out this Just the Cakes gallery we made from their account. The Navy loves cake.

Look at one Flickr Commons item and you can see its connections to other items, within the Commons and beyond. The two main organizing methods are Albums and Galleries.

• Albums and Collections (sets of albums) – a member curating and organizing their own photos
• Galleries – a member curating photos from others’ collections

Admirable Albums

Here’s an example photo, a favorite from the Library of Congress.

Going to that photo’s web page shows where else it appears.

It’s in one album from the LOC called Not An Ostrich and thirty-seven different galleries including “People with books,” “badass women,” and “Taking on the World” all of which are fun to explore.

Unlike physical photo albums, digital images can be in more than one album at once so this astronaut photo from NASA is in an album called Astronauts and also one called The Gemini Program.

Some other fun albums from Commons Members include:

• “In memory of the Amundsen-Ellsworth polar flight 1925” from the Preus Museum – an album of an album
• Vesna’s 10 favourite photos – the State Library of Queensland showcases a set curated by one of their followers
• Fairground scenes – glass slides of fairground scenes from the Discovery Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne
• DOCUMERICA – Charles O’Rear – Amtrak – Amtrak’s intercity rail service and life in rural Nebraska from the US National Archives

Learn more about creating or managing Albums on Flickr.

Grand Galleries

A Gallery is a way for Flickr users to curate images in other members’ collections.

This image of a girl dressed like a butterfly from The Field Museum Library is in their Album, called Flower Children, but also six Galleries including Girl Child, storytellers, and one only called “4.”

Searching the Commons for “fun” reveals this photo of Carla Wallenda from Florida Memory which is in thirty-nine Galleries including

• Vintage Circus Performers (Public Domain) – fourteen photos of old-time carnival actors
• Ko-Lor – bright and shiny
• Silly & Fun – people and their antics

Other Flickr users make their own Galleries specifically with Flickr Commons content.

• Oddities from the Commons
• Using Cameras Through Time
• Not all our foremothers wore taffeta and lace

Flickr user wakethesun has created a massive set of Galleries many of which are entirely Flickr Commons content.

Poke around and you’re sure to find something you enjoy!

Learn more about creating, adding or sharing Galleries on Flickr.

This is a transcript of an interview with Katrina Harkness and Joshua Youngblood, State Library & Archives of Florida, taken from a book called Web 2.0 Tools and Strategies for Archives and Local History Collections by Kate Theimer. Reprinted with permission.

What made you interested in becoming a member of the Flickr Commons?

The Florida Photographic Collection is a nationally and internationally recognized component of the State Archives of Florida and contains over a million images which are used regularly by book publishers, TV stations, and filmmakers.

Still, the Photographic Collection felt like a hidden, undiscovered treasure. The number of photographs made searching difficult for any but the most determined researcher. If only there was a way to let Floridians and the world know that we have images of important people and events in Florida history and also a little of the unexpected: flying machines, ostrich racing, mastodon fossils, mermaids, and the largest lightbulb in the world.

Sponge diver John Gonatos: Tarpon Springs, Florida, 1945

What information, tools, and processes did you need to begin?

The first and most important step for participation was consulting with the Commons team, from initial discussions about what our institution could and should offer to strategies for organizing our content and planning updates. Since we have been placing digital images and the accompanying records online for several years, the technology learning curve was not that steep. After receiving approval from the Florida Department of State, we developed disclaimers and information for the Florida Member page based on the models established by other Commons institutions.

Photographer beside mounds of oyster shells: Apalachicola, Florida, 1895

How did you determine what to include?

The Florida Photographic Collection as a whole is composed of hundreds of smaller collections. Some collections are the world of individual photographers, and some are the work of institutions such as the Department of Commerce or the Department of Environmental Protection. We decided to work within this existing framework and highlight the images that best represented these collections. We began with self-standing collections, picking collections that were historically interesting, emblematic of Florida, and underutilized. We then added selections from two of the largest collections in the Archives, the Department of Commerce and the Florida Folklife Program. Both collections contain numerous unique, fascinating, and quirky images, but both are so large that browsing the resources can be daunting.

Pam Maneeratana displays her carved pumpkins: Tallahassee, Florida, 1987

What challenges did you face?

As a state institution, adapting our traditional communication structure to the Web 2.0 culture has been challenging. Having institutions such as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian as models has helped tremendously.

Waves hit Navarre Pier hard during Hurricane Ivan’s approach: Navarre Beach, Florida, 2004

What kinds of positive results have you had? (And, any negative ones?)

Being part of the Commons has meant being part of a community of people who are passionate about photographs, history, and contributing to public knowledge.

Accessing millions of potential catalogs and researchers—and volunteer ones at that—is very exciting.

We experienced a steady rise in visits to the Archives photos since the Flickr release, and the feedback from the Commons viewers has been overwhelmingly positive and very gratifying. Some previously unknown information about specific photos has been provided by Flickr viewers, and we have been adding that information when appropriate to the catalog entries.

We get to see very personal reactions to the photographs that we never got from Web statistics.

We’ve had comments and tags in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Japanese. People have recognized family members, childhood friends, favorite places, or seen intimate glimpses of their own towns in a different era.

About how much time does it take?

Working with the Commons team to work out the logistics for our participation and the initial launch took about four months. It can take an hour or two a day responding to questions and preparing for new batch releases.

Nation’s smallest Post Office in Ochopee, Florida, c. 1940s

What advice would you give an organization wanting to use something similar?

The opportunity to contribute unique historical resources from your institution to an international dialogue is worth the time commitment.

Underwater photography at the springs, c. 1950

See more of Florida Photographic Collection on Flickr Commons.

Flickr is a photo-sharing website and has always been about connecting people through photography. It is different from a generic image-hosting service. Flickr Commons, the program launched in 2008 for museums, libraries, and archives to share their photography collections, is different again: it’s about sharing photography collections with a very big audience, and providing tools to help people to contribute information and knowledge about the pictures, ideally to supplement whatever catalogue information already exists.

A collection development policy is a framework for information institutions like libraries, archives and museums to define what they collect, and importantly, what they don’t collect. It’s an important part of maintaining a coherent and valuable collection while trends and technologies change and advance around the organisation. We think it’s time for the Flickr Commons to have a policy like this.

• Please visit the Collection Development Policy, Version 2023.10.01.1 Google doc if you’d like to review it.

As the Flickr Commons collection grows, we’re seeing all kinds of images in there: photographs, maps, documents, drawings, museum objects, book scans, and more. Therefore, one aspect of the policy is to ask our members to use of Flickr’s “Content-Type” field to improve the way their images can be categorised and found in search. 

Why are we asking Flickr Commons members to categorise their images?

Since the program launched in 2008, the Flickr Commons has grown to also include illustrations, maps, letters, book scans, and other imagery. The default setting for uploads across all accounts is content_type=Photo, so if you don’t alter that default for new uploads, every image is classified as a photo. This starts to break down if you upload, say, the Engrossed Declaration of Independence, or, a wood engraving of Bloodletting Instruments.

One of the largest Flickr Commons accounts is the great and good British Library, which famously published 1 million illustrations into the program in 2013, announcing:

“The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of… We are looking for new, inventive ways to navigate, find and display these ‘unseen illustrations’. ”

– A million first steps by Ben O’Steen, 12 December 2013

Because the default setting for uploads is content_type=Photos, it meant that every search on Flickr Commons was inundated with “the beige 19th Century.” Those images had, by default, been categorised as Photos, but instead were millions of pictures from 17th, 18th, and 19th-century books. 

Earlier this year, the British Library team adjusted the images in their account to set them as “Illustration/Art” and not Photos. But, that had the effect of “hiding” their content from general, default-set searches. This unintentional hiding raised a little alarm with their followers (who were used to seeing the book scans in their searching), some of whom wrote in to ask what had happened. And rightly so, because it had yet to be explained to them by us or by the search interface.

The Backstory

In any aggregated system of cultural materials, you get colossal variegation. Humans describe things differently, no matter how many professional standards we try to implement. Last year, in 2022, the Flickr Commons was mostly a vast swathe of images from scanned book pages. Not photographs, per se, or things created first as photographs. 

There have been two uploads into Flickr Commons of over one million things. The first one was in 2013, by the British Library, whose intention was to ask the community to help describe the million or so book illustrations they had carefully organised with book structure metadata and described using clever machine tags. The BL team was also careful to avoid annoying the Flickr API spirits by carefully pacing their uploading not to cause any alerts. Since then, they have built a community around the collection for over a decade now, cultivating the creative reuse, inspiration and research in the imagery, primarily through the British Library Labs initiative.

The second gigantic upload, in 2014, was (also) mostly images cropped by a computer program. Created by a solo developer working in a Yahoo Research fellowship, the code was run over an extensive collection of content in Internet Archive (IA) book digitization program to crop out images on scanned book pages. Those were shoved into flickr.com using the API. The developer immediately reached the free account limits, so they negotiated through Yahoo senior management that these millions of images should become part of the Flickr Commons program in an Internet Archive Book Images (IABI) account. Since the developer was also loosely associated with the Internet Archive (IA), IA agreed to be the institutional partner in the Flickr Commons. That’s a requirement of joining the program—that the account is held by an organisation, not an individual. 

These two uploads utterly overwhelmed the smaller Flickr Commons photography collections, even as the two approaches were so different. 

Here’s a graph from April 2022 data that shows all Commons members on the x-axis, and their upload counts on the y-axis.

These whopper accounts both have billions of views overall. These view counts are unsurprising, given that they completely dominated all search results in Flickr Commons. While the Flickr Commons’ first goal has always been to “increase public access to photography collections”, its secondary—and in my opinion, much more interesting—goal is to “provide a way for the public to contribute information.”

You can see from the two following graphs that a big photo count doesn’t imply deeper engagement. In fact, we’ve seen the opposite is true, and the Flickr Commons members who enjoy the strongest engagement are those who spend time and effort to engage. Drip-feeding content—and not dumping it all at once—will also help viewers to keep up and get a good view of what is being published.

Employees working in small archives (or large ones, for that matter) simply cannot compete with a content production software program that auto-generates a crop of an image in a book scan and its associated automated many-word metadata. At the Flickr Foundation, we have a place in our hearts for the smaller cultural organisations and want to actively support their online engagements through the Flickr Commons program.

I remember when the IABI account went live. Even though I wasn’t working at Flickr or at the Flickr Foundation at the time, I thought it was a mistake to allow such a vast blast of not-photographs into the Flickr Commons, particularly the second massive collection, mainly because it had been so broadly described, meaning it would turn up content in every search.

Fast forward to last year, in April, when—as my strange first step as Executive Director—I decided in consultation and agreement with the staff at IA to act. We agreed to delete the gargantuan Internet Archive Book Images (IABI) account.

A couple of weeks later, people realised it had happened, and a riot of “Flickr is destroying the public domain” posts popped up. I had not prepared for this reaction, which is the opposite tone I want the Flickr Foundation to set! I’d consulted with the Internet Archive, and a consensus had been reached. But, I was also ignorant of the community enjoying the IABI account—I had presumed there was no community engagement since nobody had logged into the IABI account since just after the giant upload had happened in 2014. That was a mistake, I readily admit, but in my defence, the IA team echoed that same impression when we discussed it. The lone developer (who didn’t work at IA) had uploaded the millions of book images and did not engage with the community. The images were generated from lots of different institutions’ collections digitised through the Internet Archive’s wonderful book scanning initiative. Unfortunately, correct attribution for each institution had not been included in the initial metadata produced for each image. (This was later rectified by a code rewrite by Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, with support from Flickr engineering.) In some cases the content was known to have no copyright—so didn’t fit in the Flickr Commons’ “no known copyright restrictions” assertion and could/should have been declared public domain materials—along with the content_type=Photo declaration, and broad, auto-generated metadata (along with some tagging to group images into their books, for example). In other words, a millions-of-things mess. 

Despite my hesitation, we decided to restore the entire account. This scale of restoration is an incredible engineering feat and an indication of the world-class team working behind the scenes at Flickr. We also set the correct content type designation and adjusted the licences on the restored images to CC0 as Internet Archive does not claim any rights for them. This has the benefit of making them more clearly classified for reuse. 

What we are doing about it

We need to be more restrained when it comes to digital commonses. These huge piles of stuff sound great, but they are not often made with care by people. They’re generated en masse by computers and thrown online. (As a related aside, look to the millions of licensed pieces of content that are mined and inhaled to improve AI programs as their licences are ignored.) 

The British Library acknowledged this, asking for interaction and effort from interested people, and stated explicitly that their 1 million images were “wholly uncurated.” People ultimately enjoyed hunting around in a millions-of-things pile for illustrations of things and made some beautiful responses to them. Indeed, one person managed to add 45,000 tags to the British Library’s Flickr Commons content. 45,000!

Perhaps I’m about to contradict myself again and say this scale of access at a base level was good, at least for computers and computation. But, it wasn’t good inside the Flickr Commons program, and that’s why we need the Collection Development Policy so we can encourage and nurture the seeing, enjoyment and contributions to our shared photographic history we always wanted.

And that’s why we’re drafting the new policy in collaboration with the membership, so we can help Flickr Commons members know how to hold the shape of the container we’ve created instead of bursting it. 

With thanks to Josh Hadro, Martin Kalfatovic, Nora McGregor, Mia Ridge, Alexis Rossi, and Jessamyn West for your time and feedback on this post.