Flickr ( ) is an image and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was for a time a common way for amateur and professional photographers to host high-resolution photos. Flickr was owned by Yahoo! from 2005 and has been owned by SmugMug since 2018.
Flickr had a total of 112 million registered members and more than 3.5 million new images uploaded daily. On August 5, 2011, the site reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images. In 2024, it was reported as having shared 10 billion photos and accepting 25 million per day. Flickr also hosts the largest collection of Creative Commons-licensed photos on the web.
Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need to register an account, but an account must be made to upload content to the site. Registering an account also allows users to create a profile page containing photos and videos that the user has uploaded and also grants the ability to add another Flickr user as a contact. For mobile users, Flickr has official mobile apps for iOS, Android, and an optimized mobile site.
History Flickr was launched on February 10, 2004, by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. The service emerged from 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. Butterfield later launched a similar online game, Glitch, which was shut down on November 14, 2012.
Early versions of Flickr focused on a chat room called FlickrLive, with real-time photo exchange capabilities. The successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing back-end for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. It was eventually dropped as Flickr's back-end systems evolved away from Game Neverendings codebase. Key features of Flickr not initially present are tags, marking photos as favorites, group photo pools and interestingness, for which a patent was granted.
In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs and an online community, in 2004, the service was widely used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.
Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr on March 20, 2005. The acquisition reportedly cost between $22 million and $25 million. During the week of June 26, 2005 to July 2, 2005, all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, and all resulting data became subject to United States federal law. On May 3, 2007, Yahoo! announced that Yahoo! Photos would close down on September 20, 2007, after which all photos would be deleted; users were encouraged to migrate to Flickr. On January 31, 2007, Flickr announced that, to continue using the service, "Old Skool" members (those who had joined before the Yahoo! acquisition) would be required to associate their account with a Yahoo! identity by March 15, 2007. This move was criticized by some users.
Flickr upgraded its services from "beta" to "gamma" status on May 16, 2006, the changes attracted positive attention from Lifehacker. On December 13, 2006, upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100 MB a month (from 20 MB) and were removed from Flickr Pro accounts, which originally had a 2 GB per month limit. On April 9, 2008, Flickr began allowing paid subscribers to upload videos, limited to 90 seconds in length and 150 MB in size. On March 2, 2009, Flickr added the facility 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. In 2009, Flickr announced a partnership with Getty Images in which selected users could submit photographs for stock photography usage and receive payment. On June 16, 2010, this was changed so that users could label images as suitable for stock use themselves.
On May 20, 2013, Flickr launched the first stage of a major site redesign, introducing a "Justified View" close-spaced photo layout browsed via "infinite scrolling" and adding new features, including one terabyte of free storage for all users, a scrolling home page (mainly of contacts photos and comments) and updated Android app. The Justified View is paginated between 72 and 360 photos per page but unpaginated in search result presentation. Tech Radar described the new style Flickr as representing a "sea change" in its purpose. Many users criticized the changes, and the site's help forum received thousands of negative comments. On March 25, 2014, Flickr's New Photo Experience, a user interface redesign, left beta.
On May 7, 2015, Yahoo! overhauled the site, adding a revamped Camera Roll, a new way to upload photos, and upgraded the site's apps. The new Uploadr application was made available for Macs, Windows and mobile devices.
In 2018, Yahoo! (owned by Verizon at that point) sold Flickr to SmugMug."Flickr Bought by Smugmug as Yahoo Breakup Begins" , The Guardian, April 23, 2018.
In early May 2019, SmugMug announced the migration of Flickr data, involving 100+ million accounts and billions of photos and videos, from the servers of former owner Yahoo! to Amazon Web Services (AWS), in a planned 12-hour transition to occur on May 22, 2019.
SmugMug launched the non-profit Flickr Foundation in December 2022 with the goal of preserving free photos on Flickr for 100 years in the public domain.
In May 2023, Flickr announced the development of the Print Shop feature that was being tested with a list of approved sellers. The Print shop feature allows photographers to sell prints via a storefront, and allows purchases from consumers. The feature was to allow only approved members access to it, but the criteria for that were yet to be announced.
Corporate changes On June 13, 2008, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield announced his resignation on July 12, 2008, which followed that of his wife and co-founder Caterina Fake, who left the company on the same day. Butterfield wrote a humorous resignation letter to Brad Garlinghouse.
On December 14, 2008, The Guardian reported that three employees had been laid off as Yahoo! continued to reduce its workforce and, on November 30, 2010, CNET reported Yahoo! was on the verge of a major layoff, affecting 10% to 20% of its workforce. Flickr was specifically named as a target for these layoffs.
On June 13, 2017, Verizon Communications acquired Yahoo!, including Flickr. Verizon reorganized Yahoo!, along with AOL, into a new umbrella company, Oath, which was renamed as Verizon Media on January 8, 2019.
On April 20, 2018, SmugMug acquired Flickr from Verizon's Oath and put an end to Flickr 1 TB storage plan for free users. Those users had until February 5, 2019, to convert to "Pro" accounts or their photo streams would be reduced to a maximum of 1,000 pictures. The deadline was later extended to March 12, 2019. The reasons cited were that the existing model was unsustainable by a medium-sized company which could not get revenues by selling profiles of the users. The sentiment was generally agreed on among the professionals. This policy, however, was never implemented and was abandoned in March, 2022 in favor of a policy that restricted content unless the user upgraded and paid for a Pro account.
Features Accounts Flickr has always offered two types of accounts: free and paid. Until January 7, 2019, free accounts had up to 1 TB of storage. On January 8, 2019, the account offerings changed. The free option is limited to 1,000 photos or videos stored, with videos limited to three minutes. After January 8, 2019, members over the limit could no longer upload new photos to Flickr. On February 5, 2019, a free account's older content would be deleted automatically if it contains more than 1,000 photos and they do not subscribe to the paid service tier, with the exception of content that was already uploaded with a Creative Commons copyright license before November 1, 2018.
The paid option features "unlimited" storage, advanced statistics, advertising-free browsing, videos up to 10 minutes in length, "premier" customer service, and promotional offers with other partners.
In May 2011, Flickr added an option to easily reverse an account termination, motivated by the accidental deletion of a Flickr user's account, and public reporting of its protracted restoration. Flickr may delete accounts without giving any reason or warning to the account's owner.
As a result of the SmugMug buyout, Flickr added the ability for users to download all of their account data, such as photo albums, contacts, and comments.
On April 15, 2025, Flickr announced to restrict downloads of original and large-size images (larger than 1024 px) owned by free accounts since May 15, Creative Commons-licensed photos and Flickr Commons members will not be affected.
Organization The images a photographer uploads to Flickr go into their sequential "photostream", the basis of a Flickr account. All photostreams can be displayed as a justified view, a slide show, a "detail" view or a date stamped archive. Clicking on a photostream image opens it in the interactive "photopage" alongside data, comments and facilities for embedding images on external sites.
Users may label their uploaded images with titles and descriptions, and images may be tagged, either by the uploader or by other users, if the uploader permits it. These text components enable computer searching of Flickr. Flickr was an early website to implement tag clouds, which were used until 2013, providing access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Tagging was further revised in the photopage redesign of March 2014. Flickr has been cited as a prime example of effective use of folksonomy.
Users can organize their Flickr photos into "albums" (formerly "sets") which are more flexible than the traditional folder-based method of organizing files, as one photo can belong to one album, many albums, or none at all. Flickr provides code to embed albums into blogs, websites and forums. Flickr albums represent a form of categorical metadata rather than a physical hierarchy. Geotagging can be applied to photos in albums, and any albums with geotagging can be related to a map using imapflickr. The resulting map can be embedded in a website. Flickr albums may be organized into "collections", which can themselves be further organized into higher-order collections.
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, as an alternative to the standard Flickr interface for editing.
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