Flickr is an
image and
video hosting website,
web services
suite, and
online community
platform. In addition to being a popular website for users to share
personal photographs, the service is widely used by
bloggers as a photo repository. , it claims to host
more than 4 billion images.
History
Flickr was
developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company that launched Flickr in February
2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created
for Ludicorp's
Game
Neverending, a web-based
massively multiplayer online
game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game
Neverending was shelved.
Early versions of Flickr focused on a multiuser
chat room called FlickrLive with real-time photo
exchange capabilities. There was also an emphasis on collecting
images found on the web rather than photographs taken by users. The
successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing
backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the
site map. It was eventually dropped as Flickr's backend systems
evolved away from the Game Neverending's codebase.
Some of the key features of Flickr not initially present were
tags, marking photos as favorites,
group photo pools and interestingness, for which a
patent is pending.
In March 2005,
Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and
Flickr.
During the week of June 26 – July 2, 2005,
all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers
in the United
States, resulting in all data becoming subject to United States federal
law.
On May 16, 2006, Flickr updated its services from
beta to "gamma", along with a design
and structural overhaul. According to the site's
FAQ, the term "gamma", rarely used in software
development, is intended to be
tongue-in-cheek to indicate that the service
is always being tested by its users, and is in a state of perpetual
improvement. A further connotation, more specific to photography
and the display of images, is that of
gamma correction. For all intents and
purposes, the current service is considered a stable release.
In December 2006, upload limits on free accounts were increased to
100MB a month (from 20MB) and were removed from Pro Accounts,
permitting unlimited uploads for holders of these accounts
(originally a 2GB per month limit).
In January 2007, Flickr announced that "Old Skool" members—those
who had joined before the Yahoo acquisition—would be required to
associate their account with a Yahoo ID by March 15 to continue
using the service. This move was criticized by some users.
On April 9, 2008, Flickr began to allow paid subscribers to upload
videos, limited to 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size. On March
2, 2009, Flickr added the ability to upload and view
HD videos, and began allowing free users to upload
normal-resolution video. At the same time, the set limit for free
accounts was lifted.
Corporate changes
In June 2008, Flickr co-founder
Stewart Butterfield announced his
resignation following his wife and co-founder
Caterina Fake, who left the company on June
13, 2008. Butterfield wrote a humorous resignation letter to Brad
Garlinghouse in which he stated that he was an old tin man in a new
age.
On December 11, 2008,
The
Guardian reported that three employees had been laid off
as Yahoo continued to reduce its workforce.
Features
Accounts
Flickr offers two types of accounts: Free and Pro.Free account
users are allowed to upload 100 MB of images a month and 2 videos.
Also, if a free user has more than 200 photos on the site, they
will only be able to see the most recent 200 in their photostream.
The other photos that were uploaded are still stored on the site
and links to these images in blog posts remain active. Free users
can also contribute to a maximum of 10 photo pools. If a free
account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be
deleted.
Pro accounts allow users to upload an unlimited number of images
and videos every month and receive unlimited bandwidth and storage.
Photos may be placed in up to 60 group pools, and Pro account users
receive ad-free browsing and have access to account
statistics.
Organization
A screenshot of hot tags on Flickr
Flickr asks photo submitters to organize images using
tags (a form of
metadata), which allow searchers to
find images related to particular topics, such as
place names or subject matter. Flickr
was also an early website to implement
tag
clouds, which provide access to images tagged with the most
popular keywords. Because of its support for tags, Flickr has been
cited as a prime example of effective use of
folksonomy, although
Thomas Vander Wal suggested Flickr is not
the best example.
Flickr also allows users to organize their photos into "sets", or
groups of photos that fall under the same heading. However, sets
are more flexible than the traditional folder-based method of
organizing files, as one photo can belong to one set, many sets, or
none at all. Flickr's "sets", then, represent a form of categorical
metadata rather than a physical
hierarchy. Sets may be grouped into "collections", and collections
further grouped into higher-order collections.
Finally, Flickr offers a fairly comprehensive web-service API that
allows programmers to create applications that can perform almost
any function a user on the Flickr site can do. To use the Flickr
API, users need to know their Flickr NSIDs. Several sites have been
developed to aid users in this, including idGettr and What Is My
Flickr Id.
Organizr
Organizr is a
web application for
organizing photos within a Flickr account that can be accessed
through the Flickr interface. It allows users to modify tags,
descriptions, and set groupings, and to place photos on a world map
(a feature provided in conjunction with
Yahoo! Maps). It uses
Ajax to emulate the look, feel,
and quick functionality of desktop-based photo-management
applications, such as Google's
Picasa and
F-Spot. Users can select and apply changes to
multiple photos at a time, making it a better tool for batch
editing than the standard Flickr interface.
Access control
Flickr provides both private and public image storage. A user
uploading an image can set privacy controls that determine who can
view the image. A photo can be flagged as either public or private.
Private images are visible by default only to the uploader, but
they can also be marked as viewable by friends and/or family.
Privacy settings also can be decided by adding photographs from a
user's photostream to a "group pool". If a group is private all the
members of that group can see the photo. If a group is public the
photo becomes public as well. Flickr also provides a "contact list"
which can be used to control image access for a specific set of
users in a way similar to that of
LiveJournal.
In November 2006 Flickr created a "guest pass" system that allows
private photos to be shared with non Flickr members. For instance,
a person could email this pass to parents who may not have an
account to allow them to see the photos otherwise restricted from
public view. This setting allows sets to be shared, or all photos
under a certain privacy category (friends or family) to be
shared.
In March 2007, Flickr added new content filtering controls that let
members specify by default what types of images they generally
upload (photo, art/illustration, or
screenshot) and how "safe" (i.e., unlikely to
offend others) their images are, as well as specify that
information for specific images individually. In addition, users
can specify the same criteria when searching for images. There are
some restrictions on searches for certain types of users:
non-members must always use SafeSearch, which omits images noted as
potentially offensive, while members whose Yahoo! accounts indicate
that they are underage may use SafeSearch or moderate SafeSearch,
but cannot turn SafeSearch off completely.
Many members allow their photos to be viewed by anyone, forming a
large collaborative
database of categorized
photos. By default, other members can leave comments about any
image they have permission to view, and in many cases can add to
the list of tags associated with an image.
Interaction and compatibility
Flickr's functionality includes
RSS and
Atom feeds and an
API that allows
independent programmers to expand its services.
The core functionality of the site relies on standard
HTML and
HTTP features, allowing for wide
compatibility among
platforms and
browsers. Organizr uses
Ajax, with which most modern browsers are
compliant, and most of Flickr's other text-editing and tagging
interfaces also possess Ajax functionality.
Images can be posted to the user's collection via email
attachments, enabling direct uploads from many cameraphones and
applications with email capabilities.
Flickr has increasingly been adopted by many web users as their
primary photo storage site, especially members of the
weblog community. In addition, it is popular with
Macintosh and
Linux users, who are locked out of photo-sharing sites
that require Windows and
Internet
Explorer.
Flickr uses the
Geo microformat on
the pages for over 3 million
geotagged
images.
Flickr has entered into partnerships with third parties to offer
printing of various forms of merchandise, including business cards,
photo books, stationery, personalized credit cards, and large-size
prints, from companies such as
Moo,
Blurb,
Tiny Prints,
Capital One,
Imagekind, and
QOOP. In
addition, Flickr has partnered with
Getty
Images to sell stock photos from some users.
Users of
Windows Live Photo
Gallery and Apple's
iPhoto (version 8)
have the ability to upload their photos directly to Flickr.
Flickr provides a desktop client for
Mac OS
X and Windows that allows users to upload photos without using
the web interface. Uploadr allows drag-and-drop batch uploading of
photos, the setting of tags and descriptions for each batch, and
the editing of privacy settings.
Filtering
In March 2007, Flickr introduced mandatory filtering of all photos
and a process of central review of photos by staff to set levels of
appropriateness. By default all Flickr accounts are set to the
status appropriate for a minor and must be changed by the user in
their account.
Flickr has
since used this setting to change the level of accessibility to
"unsafe" content for entire nations, including South Korea, Hong
Kong, and Germany. In
summer 2007, German users staged a "revolt" over being assigned to
the user rights of a
minor. See
Censorship below.
The filter system of Flickr assumes that photos may be unsafe and
should not be public until a staff person has validated that the
material is safe. Until this happens, which could take up to a
month, material cannot be viewed by persons without a valid Yahoo
and Flickr account. A Flickr site not marked as safe can only be
viewed by people in the community who have set their filters beyond
the default status of that of a "minor".
Licensing
Flickr offers users the ability to either release their images
under certain common usage
licenses or label
them as "
all rights reserved".
The licensing options primarily include the
Creative Commons 2.0 attribution-based and
minor content-control licenses - although jurisdiction and
version-specific licenses cannot be selected. As with "
tags", the site allows easy searching of only
those images that fall under a specific license.
Map sources
In addition to using commercial mapping data, Flickr now uses
OpenStreetMap mapping for various
cities; this began with
Beijing during the
run-up to the 2008 Olympic games.
, this is used for Baghdad, Beijing, Kabul, Sydney, and
Tokyo. OpenStreetMap data is collected by
volunteers and is available on a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license from
Creative Commons.
Implementation
According to the company, Flickr is hosted on 62
databases across 124
servers, with about 800,000
user accounts per pair of servers. Based on
information compiled by highscalability.com, the
MySQL databases are hosted on servers that are
Linux-based (from
RedHat), with a software platform that includes
Apache,
PHP
(with
PEAR and
Smarty),
shards,
Memcached,
Squid,
Perl,
ImageMagick,
and
Java; the system
administration tools include
Ganglia,
SystemImager, Subcon, and
CVSup.
Controversy
Censorship
Users in mainland China could not see
any images in Flickr when they log in.
On June 12, 2007, in the wake of the rollout of localized language
versions of the site, Flickr implemented a user-side rating system
for filtering out potentially controversial photos. Simultaneously,
users with accounts registered with Yahoo subsidiaries in Germany,
Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea were prevented from viewing photos
rated "moderate" or "restricted" on the three-part scale used. Many
Flickr users, particularly in Germany, protested against the new
restrictions, claiming unwanted
censorship from Flickr and Yahoo.
Flickr management, unwilling to go into legal details, implied that
the reason for the stringent filtering was the unusually strict
age-verification laws in Germany. The issue received some attention
in the German national media, especially in online publications.
Initial reports indicated that Flickr's action was a sensible, if
unattractive, precaution against prosecution, although later
coverage implied that Flickr's action may have been unnecessarily
strict.
On June 20, 2007, Flickr reacted by granting German users access to
"moderate" (but not "restricted") images, and hinted at a future
solution for Germany, involving advanced age-verification
procedures.
On June 1,
2009, Flickr was blocked in China in advance of the 20th
anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of
1989.
Virgin Mobile ad copyright
In 2007,
Virgin Mobile launched a
bus stop ad
campaign promoting their cellphone
text messaging service using the work of
amateur photographers who uploaded their work to Flickr using a
Creative
Commons by Attribution license. Users licensing their images
this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as
the original creator was attributed credit, without any other
compensation being required. Virgin upheld this single restriction
by printing a URL, leading to the photographer's Flickr page, on
each of their ads. However, one picture depicted 15 year-old Alison
Chang at a fund-raising carwash for her church, for which Chang
sued Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons. The photo was taken by
Alison's church youth counsellor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who uploaded
the image to Flickr under the
Creative
Commons license.
On November 27, 2007, Chang filed for a voluntary dismissal of the
lawsuit against Creative Commons,focusing their lawsuit against
Virgin Mobile. The case was thrown out of court due to lack of
jurisdiction and subsequently Virgin Mobile did not incur any
damages towards the defendant.
Yahoo! Photos
Yahoo announced that they would shut down
Yahoo! Photos on
September 20, 2007, after which all photos would be deleted. During
the interim, users had the ability to migrate their photos to
Flickr or other services (including
Shutterfly,
Kodak
Gallery,
Snapfish, and
Photobucket). All who migrated to Flickr were
given three months of a Flickr Pro account.
The Commons
Several museums and archives post images released under a "no known
restrictions" license, which was first made available on January
16, 2008. The goal of the license is to "firstly show you hidden
treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly
to show how your input and knowledge can help make these
collections even richer."
Participants include George Eastman
House, Library of Congress, Brooklyn
Museum, Nationaal
Archief, National Archives and Records
Administration, State Library of New South
Wales, and Smithsonian Institution.
See also
References
- 4 Billion Photos on Flickr from Flickr
Blog
- Flickr Co-founders Join Mass Exodus From
Yahoo
- Stewart Butterfield's bizarre resignation letter to
Yahoo from valleywag.com
-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/dec/11/yahoo-flickr-layoffs
- http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/
- API Documentation from Flickr
- http://www.idGettr.com/
- What Is My Flickr Id
- flickr.com / Help / FAQ / Content filters
- Geo examples, in the wild
- Flickr Photos Become Stock Photography at Getty
Images from mashable.com; retrieved on 2009-05-18
- http://flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/43626/ Official Topid:
German SafeSearch Settings
- Flickr Architecture, a November 14, 2007
article by Todd Hoff
- heise online - Flickr filter raises
eyebrows
- Zwangsfilter: Flickr verbietet Deutschen Nacktfotos -
Netzwelt - SPIEGEL ONLINE - Nachrichten
- Foto-Portal: Jugendschützer: Flickr-Filter nach deutschem
Recht nicht nötig - Netzwelt - SPIEGEL ONLINE -
Nachrichten
- China Blocks Twitter, Hotmail, Flickr, Bing Before
Tiananmen 20th
- From the Why-a-GC-from-Cravath-is-great Department:
The lawsuit is over (Lessig Blog)
-
http://blog.internetcases.com/2009/01/22/no-personal-jurisdiction-over-australian-defendant-in-flickr-right-of-publicity-case/
- Yodel Anecdotal » Blog Archive » Give your Photos
the fun of Flickr
External links