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What’s Flickr Commons?

And how could it help your institution?

The Flickr Commons is a special program that lives on flickr.com. It’s designed to support cultural organizations to share their photography collections with the public, and to gather new information that may be added by interested Flickr members.

The main benefits of Flickr Commons are:

  • Huge exposure of your collections, with views in the millions over time
  • New possibilities to easily connect with international audiences and build community around your collection
  • Free Flickr Pro account, sponsored by Flickr Inc
  • Low-cost, high-usability, high-traffic web platform, used by millions of people since it launched in 2004
  • World-class software features to organize and share your image collections, like albums, collections, tagging and more
  • Joining a community of over 100 other international cultural organizations
  • Technical accessibility via the powerful Flickr API 

“No known copyright restrictions”

Flickr has created this special program to support cultural organizations with photography collections where copyright is unclear. It allows you to publish your imagery where you can confidently claim there are “no known copyright restrictions.”

If today you are able to confidently attach a copyright license or a Creative Commons license to the digitized photography in your collection, you may be better suited to a standard Flickr account. In future, our hope is to include the more open content licenses in the Flickr Commons program, likely CC0 and/or the Public Domain Mark, to support organizations which are able to claim copyright over their holdings and can offer fully open reuse.

“Life in the library” photos

Today, Flickr Commons accounts are intended for historical photography collections. If you also want to publish “life in the library” photos, we kindly suggest you create a separate, standard Flickr account for this. You can see a great example of this via the Library of Congress Flickr Commons presence, and their separate Library of Congress Life account.

Here’s superstar Lizzo hanging out with the librarians and their flutes and sheet music collections, taken in 2022, and in the “daily life” account:

20220926SM1042

Compare standard Flickr accounts with Flickr Commons

Flickr Free account Flickr Pro account Flickr Commons account
Established 2004 2005 2008
Intended for Anyone, individual or organization Anyone, individual or organization Recognized cultural institutions (and not individuals)
License options Use any licenses offered by Flickr: full copyright, Creative Commons Use any licenses offered by Flickr: full copyright, Creative Commons Use the special assertion only offered to Flickr Commons members: “No known copyright restrictions”

(We are planning to introduce CC0 and PD licenses in future.)
How many accounts? Millions! Millions! 113 registered members
How much content? Billions of images! Billions of images! About 2 million images!
Cost Free $24.95 per year Free

(Sponsored by Flickr Inc.)
Account limits Find out more about Flickr Pro accounts on flickr.com