“Flickr.com is a Gathering of Memory” Insights from the Flickr Foundation’s First Conversation

Susan Mernit & George Oates

On September 26, 2024, we hosted our first-ever public conversation featuring director George Oates and advisors Anasuya Sengupta and Eliza Gregory. The event explored critical questions about preserving digital visual history in our rapidly evolving technological landscape.

The discussion centered on our purpose: to keep Flickr pictures visible for 100 years. We discussed the long list of technological uncertainties, with George quoting another Flickr Foundation advisor, Temi Odumosu, who said, “We don’t even know what a JPEG will be in ten years.”

Anasuya described social justice issues, emphasizing that digital preservation must address questions of power and representation. She stressed how important it is for marginalized communities to control  their narratives , and how we must keep this in the front of our minds as we make tools..

The conversation touched on several key points:

  • We must balance vast scale with meaningful personal engagement
  • Using Flickr Commons to empowering communities to define their histories 
  • How we can support smaller cultural institutions in digital preservation efforts
  • What community engagement brings to enriching digital archives
  • Myriad curatorial challenges as we consider deciding what to preserve

→ Read the full transcript of the event

 

Preserving Our Visual Heritage: The Flickr Foundation was established in 2022 with the purpose to keep Flickr pictures visible for 100 years. As part of our work, we look after the Flickr Commons, a unique collection of historical photographs from cultural institutions all around the world.

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New! Flickr Commons Explorer

commons.flickr.org

At the Flickr Foundation, one of the goals we set early on when we took over responsibility for running the Flickr Commons program was to build an improved ‘discovery layer’ for the Commons collection.

We’re pleased to share with you a first look at our new Commons Explorer, available at commons.flickr.org.

We’ve built the explorer using the standard Flickr API, and have created a secondary database which is updated pretty regularly. (This is a way of us saying not all the data is live live.) And, please note that photos on display link back to flickr.com.

It’s a work in development, but we wanted to show you our progress in this early version. We’ve prioritized being able to look across the Commons in an interface that’s richer than search results. We’re surfacing activity levels across the collection too, to show that there’s a ton of chatting happening, and new uploads all the time.

The views we’ve built so far:

Home page

This is a list of recent uploads from across the Commons collection, and a sample of our members.

Members

This is a list of all the Flickr Commons members, which you can sort in different ways. We’ve set it to be sorted by the member with the most recent upload, so you’ll see active members at a glance.

Each member has their own page, where you can see their popular tags, interesting photos, and recent uploads.

Conversations

For the first time ever, you can enjoy catching up on the last week’s conversations about photos in Flickr Commons. You’ll see immediately the fantastic community that’s grown up around members like the National Library of Ireland’s photostream, and get to know some of the volunteer researchers inhabiting and contributing their time and detective skills to enrich the Commons.

Stats

Here we present activity across the collection, like uploading volumes, comments, and popular tags across the collection…

About

A simple static page which outlines what we’re doing. And finally…

Search!

We’ve made a bone simple search for the explorer too, so you can quickly see a splat of pictures about just about anything. Even with a few million photos, there’s a huge range of tagging and other description happening. Jump into London, pie, Istanbul, and smiles, or just look for the magnifying glass in the top right of the nav bar.

We hope you enjoy exploring, and, please let us know if you have ideas for how we can improve upon what’s there so far!

In other Flickr Commons news

We are working with the Flickr company to develop a new set of API methods the Foundation will be able to use to build the member management tools we need to really lean into rejuvenating the Commons and especially growing the new membership. If we can introduce 5-10 new members to the program this year, we’ll be stoked! More, we’ll be even stoked-er.

This will involve a new home for registrations of interest, and a smoother onboarding experience for new members as they come on board. Generally, we’re looking forward to new insights into the overall health of the program in the form of better views on activity (the beginnings of which you can see in commons.flickr.org).

If you are either from an existing member institution, or you’re curious about joining in and sharing your historical photography collections, please let us know.

In our early research back in 2021, we noted we wanted to get to know more of the volunteer community too, and see if we can learn about their needs for participating with research and commentary, and I’m pleased to report we’ve begun that, with our first interview with a prominent community member last week. (I was so excited I could barely talk, but Jessamyn wisely recorded the conversation and will be reporting on it soon.)