This is a sister post to A millions-of-things pile: Why we need a Collection Development Policy for Flickr Commons. We’re writing this because our new policy changes what turns up in Flickr Commons searches.

Images can be categorised as Photos, Screenshots, Illustration/Art, Virtual Photos, or Videos on Flickr. 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.

Therefore, we’ve launched our new Collection Development Policy to ask Flickr Commons members to classify their images more specifically.

Default search settings

Searching on Flickr defaults to only showing content_type=Photos and Videos. That default means that if one of the Flickr Commons members does change the content type for their uploads, those other types will fall out of the default search results.

We know this can come as a surprise to viewers who were familiar with how things worked before we started asking Flickr Commons members to use the new policy. That surprise isn’t great, so we’re working on addressing it, and working with the flickr.com Customer Support team to get documentation online.

Part of that work is to show how the search works, so you can broaden it to include other content types. To do this, you open up the Advanced Search panel—on the right, under the header search box—and look for the “Content” heading. You can select or remove the different types of content as you wish.

If you want to share around a list of search results that also contain, say, images cropped from page scans of old books (which would now be marked as content type=Illustration/Art), you can see that these settings will show up in the search URLs as parameters if you change them, like this:

→ https://flickr.com/search/?is_commons=1&text=smile&content_types=0%2C2

Those parameters highlighted in bold tell you the search is filtering for Photos [0] and [%2C] Illustrations/Art [2]. So, as you adjust your content type settings, you can share URLs that will take other people straight there without needing to adapt their Advanced settings.

We know this is a bit fiddly, but your default settings—whether on upload or as you search—should stick if you ever adjust them.

The Flickr Commons has been around since 2008, but hasn’t been looked after too well. There is still lots of activity, but the membership hasn’t grown for a few years, and there are no special tools for members, or for the volunteer researchers who help out by adding information about the photographs shared. We did a bunch of research in 2021 about how to turn things around, and I’m happy to say, bringing Jessamyn in to help is a fantastic power-up.

Essentially, the plan to resurrect the program has two main elements:

1. Stabilise the current membership – support community cohesion and communication, develop  aggregate/activity baseline views, fix out-of-date stuff on flickr.com/commons, reconnect with “sleepy” members, and
2. Grow the membership – we especially want to support small institutions who either cannot afford to pay for expensive collection management software, or don’t have enough staff to build out that kind of digital resource, help show/teach members about licensing, digitization, preservation techniques that we can support, build out partnerships and collaborations around the open web, open licensing, and, importantly, careful sharing (as opposed to batch throwing huge piles of cultural materials across the internet without appropriate care).

In her own words:

Hi I’m Jessamyn, and I’ve been a Flickr member since 2004. I’m the daughter of two serious hobby photographers (mom|dad) both of whom have legacy accounts on Flickr and I’ve put a few photos up there as well. I’ve really benefited, over the last two decades, from having a well-organized archive of at least some of my family’s digital heritage. Here’s my great great grandmother, and here’s my great great grandfather from the other side of the family.

I’m a big free culture fan, having done work for the Internet Archive and Wikipedia helping make more “stuff” available to more people online. I also help run MetaFilter, a large online community. My background is in librarianship and technology, so anything that combines those two things piques my interest and makes me happy. I write an irregular newsletter on the topic. I’ve been a huge fan of Flickr Commons since it launched in 2008, often using its images to illustrate Wikipedia or other digital projects.

When the Flickr Foundation came into view, I really wanted to help get more cultural heritage institutions get the tools they needed and wanted so that they could share their culture in a place geared towards longevity and community. I’m happy to be here.

You think you’re happy to be here, Jessamyn? YES! I’m so excited about it! We were on a zoom last week basically giggling at each other. I can’t wait to get started, so here’s a huge and happy welcome to you!

Oh, and while I have your attention, we’ve also just posted another position: Tech Lead. Please share in your networks, and apply if you’re interested!

At SmugMug + Flickr, we believe that photography is an incredibly important visual record of our history. As citizens, we don’t have nearly enough access to our own photographic histories that we collectively own in the public domain. In light of that, we’re thrilled to announce the founding of our very own nonprofit, the Flickr Foundation.

How did we get here? It starts in 2018 when, after years of attempts, we (SmugMug) were fortunate enough to be able to buy Flickr from Yahoo!. We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was an amazing business opportunity—it was losing staggering amounts of money, and nobody else seemed interested in the potential. Instead, we bought Flickr because we’ve built our company around a love for photography, and we couldn’t imagine an internet without the amazing community and the staggering collection of photography that Flickr supported.

We knew Flickr meant a lot of things to a lot of communities, but it rapidly became clear just how important it was once the acquisition announcements went out. Within hours and days, we were fielding requests from organizations and individuals around the globe wondering what it meant for their work and their communities. The CEO of Creative Commons flew out to our offices immediately to discuss the future of the hundreds of millions of open licensed works being shared on Flickr. It was an easy decision to not only protect those photos, but to work on growing the collection collaboratively.

Government agencies around the globe reached out to express how important their Flickr community is to connecting to the people they support. Schools, clubs, and community organizations also shared with us how critical Flickr has become to what they do and how they share. 

One of those first contacts we received really spoke to the importance and truly unique position Flickr occupied online. The team at the Library of Congress reached out to ask about the future of the Flickr Commons. This huge collection of public domain, cultural heritage works had been tirelessly digitized, curated, and uploaded to share with the entire world by over a hundred organizations. Those organizations included larger institutions like the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, British Library and so many more. But it also contained much smaller organizations, opening collections to the public from all over the world.  

We already knew we would preserve these collections, but we wanted to do more than just focus on preservation. Millions of photos from hundreds of institutions is a huge collection, but it barely scratches the surface of public domain historic photography that still isn’t easily accessible to the general public. We were determined, but directionless. I couldn’t stop thinking about the opportunity to do something meaningful, but I really didn’t know where to start or how to prioritize what mattered. 

One night, while very unproductively thinking through the challenges, I sent a cold email to George Oates. More than a decade before, George had started this whole Flickr Commons project and laid the foundation I was now hoping to build upon. I simply reached out, and told her that I loved the Flickr Commons and I wanted to do more with that community. She answered my email, we met, and we fairly quickly went to work together to think through what the future of this preservation could look like. The scope of the project has dramatically expanded as our vision and mission became more clear, but it still all comes back to one simple idea. 

The Flickr Foundation is working to expand access to photographic history, and to preserve those photographs for generations to come. We’re also aware that our communities are documenting those histories right now. Flickr is full of events, both significant and small, that document our humanity. In order to truly preserve and share our photographic history, we must also build out a plan and a foundation for the living history on all our digital platforms. 

We’re doing this so that in 100 years, we aren’t just sharing millions of cultural heritage photographs. With the work of the Flickr Foundation, we’re creating a visual commons—a collective reference of our history and our humanity, accessible by anyone, anywhere.