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Flickr.com updates to CC4.0

By George Oates, Date June 20, 2025
Stargazing in NGC 6355 from The European Space Agency
CC BY

Hooray! You can use CC 4.0 licenses on Flickr.com now.

Honestly, I just wrote a nice post about how Stewart announced Flickr was offering licensing in June 2004, then Ryan Merkley (then CEO of CC, now Flickr.org board chair) visited SmugMug leadership in 2018 to figure out what was going to happen to the 400M or so CC images on Flickr at the time. Then in 2021, the number breached 500M, and how yay! CC4.0 is now live – lots more info over on the Flickr blog.

But, WordPress ate that when I went to add the sparkly stargazing image, and I have to move on, so please forgive my brief announcement!

From our perspective, we hope to convince Flickr.com to introduce CC0 and PDM-licensed images into the Flickr Commons program at some point. Lots of museums, libraries, and archives around the world now use open licensing correctly on digitised materials, and we’d like to support that.

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