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.

Greetings, Oreoluwa! Introducing our next 2025 Research Fellow

Oreoluwa Akinyode joins us as our second Research Fellow of 2025, exploring the historic interplay of West African photography and textiles.

Looking for Daybooks in the Archives

Our research lead Fattori McKenna sifted through Flickr Commons for daybooks throughout history to consider what can be gained by keeping a Flickr Foundation daybook.

Four Principles for Reflective Web Archiving

Jill Blackmore Evans returns to put forth four principles for enacting Reflective Web Archiving, to deliver a more responsible, equitable and usable web archive for the future.