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Creative Archives

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

Please note: This program ceased in December 2025.

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.

Current Project: Digital Day Book

Our work these days is so diffuse. Lots of different digital services. The Digital Day Book is a project to record our work at the Foundation so it can be explored long after we have left. Read more

The Sustainability of Slowness

Listen to George Oates and Foundation research partner, Temi Odumosu, in conversation with Amanda Meeks at permanent.org, on the ways in which we can all preserve our memories within a changing digital landscape.Listen now

‘Threading Ephemeral’: Oreoluwa’s closing reflections on the Fellowship

As Oreoluwa's Fellowship project draws to a close, they share their concluding artistic output and critical reflections on image-making

Read more
Screenshot of a Google doc (that is the report)

The State of Social Media Archiving

Read our market research on how social media platforms allow their users to download their stuff.

Read the report

2026: Simplifying Our Strategy

We're making adjustments to our programming and team in the coming months to weather the current storm affecting nonprofits across the US and more broadly.

Learn more about our plans
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