Creative Archives

Flickr can do things in ways traditional archives can’t: discuss.

About the program

The whole Flickr corpus is simply massive—tens of billions of digital objects, and growing every day. It’s one of the biggest image collections humans have ever created. Its huge scale makes it difficult to look after, let alone preserve.

Creative Archives investigates accessible tactics around ethics of care, decentralization, social or local archives, explorable formats, and machine-based support. 

We’re interested in archiving the foundation itself too, from the start.

New! Research Report on Data Lifeboat

Please enjoy our write-up of the co-design workshops we ran last year with preservation experts, archivists, librarians, academics, and technologists on the viability of Data Lifeboat

Flow chart outlining the lifecycle of a digital image from creation to publishing to sharing on flickr.com to preservation

Accessible Archives: our strategy for the next three years

Find out more about how we are centering our work on the digital image lifecycle, from creation to preservation

Future Memories Symposium: How Photography Shapes Our Understanding of the World

Tori shares her reflections from the Rijksmuseum x World Press Photo Forum symposium in May