Happy 17th Birthday, Flickr Commons!

By George Oates

We launched Flickr Commons in 2008 with the Library of Congress, announced in my blog post entitled Many hands make light work. It was thrilling to watch the Flickr community step up and add about 10,000 tags overnight to those first two collections from the library.

We had set up the program with three main goals: increase access to historical photography collections, gather new information about them, and, ideally, feed that new information back into the contributing members’ catalogues.

There are 593,000 tags describing the Flickr Commons collection today, and the 1,853,850 photos published in it have enjoyed 4.51 billion views. I think it’s fair to say the program is successful.

It’s clear the program suffered a bit in the 2010s, as you can see from the membership graph at the top of the Members’ page on our Commons Explorer. The good news is the program is now under our roof, steered ably by our Community Lead, Jessamyn West. In just the last few months, we’ve managed to open the doors to new members for the first time in years. We are thrilled that after the decline in membership that started in 2014, we’re now on the up again. (You can meet the new members on the Flickr.com blog. That’s where we’ve been letting people know.)

The rate of monthly uploads is on the up too. We’re seeing more members return to the fold sharing new pictures, including some we had grouped as “sleepy”. And last year, 2024, we had more photos uploaded than in any of the previous five years. YES! WOO!

Future contextual gold?

Last Friday we submitted a next grant proposal to continue our work on the Data Lifeboat initiative, where it’s possible to draw out a curated/selected “sliver” of Flickr pictures for archiving elsewhere, and I mention that here because in our Data Lifeboat work, we’ve developed the idea that there’s a useful distinction between technical metadata (what the camera records at the moment of creation) and social metadata (all the information, tags, comments, etc that are created inside Flickr.com). We believe that this social metadata records and informs the social context surrounding a photograph, and that this is future contextual gold. ✨

The continuing need for Flickr Commons

The world’s libraries, archives, and museums have made remarkable progress with digital sharing through initiatives like the open culture movement and licensing innovations like Creative Commons, but many smaller museums and archives still face challenges with digitization due to limited time and resources.

This is where Flickr Commons really shines—it’s an ideal platform for these organizations, offering free, user-friendly tools and access to a vibrant global community. By joining Flickr Commons, smaller institutions can dramatically increase access to their collections and fulfill their mission of sharing cultural heritage, without the usual technical and resource barriers. Flickr’s combination of simple tools and built-in audience makes it a powerful solution for institutions looking to expand their digital presence and find new fans.

Are you in an organisation with a photographic collection, and curious about joining in?
Please register your interest in joining the Flickr Commons today!

2025 plans

Our goals for Flickr Commons this year are straightforward:

Welcome more new members, from new places. We have about 120 international organizations in the program now, and most of them are from the US/Canada and Europe. We’ll be working towards our first Indian member coming online soon, and having early conversations with an African non-profit advocating for digitization of African public domain materials.

New tools and toys! Now that we have the new Commons Explorer for you, we want to build it out more. We’re crafting an administrative dashboard to welcome and manage our members, and to help keep an eye on the health of the program. We also want to build even more ways to show off the collection, so keep an eye out for that!

Birthday cheers for our friends

Thanks to Flickr.com for your continued interest in supporting us to grow Flickr Commons again, in particular to Ruppel and Josie. We are working with the .com team to develop some new Commons-specific API methods which will allow us to sharpen our tools for managing members.

Congratulations to the Public Domain Review for announcing their new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive, a curated “collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images” (including some from Flickr Commons) which have been gathered and used in the journal over the years. Interesting that this comes at the same time as Getty Images merges with Shutterstock!