Flickr

Flickr

Type of site	Photo sharing
Available in	Chinese (Hong-Kong) English (original) French German Italian Portuguese Spanish
Owner	Yahoo!
Created by	Ludicorp
URL	http://www.flickr.com/
Commercial	Yes

Flickr is a photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform, which is generally considered an early example of a Web 2.0 application.

In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its innovative online community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means.

History

Flickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based company founded in 2002. Ludicorp launched Flickr in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.

Early incarnations of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities. There was also an emphasis on collecting images found on the web rather than photographs taken by users. The successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. It was eventually dropped as Flickr's back end systems evolved away from the Game Neverending's codebase.

Some of the key features of Flickr not initially present were tags, marking photos as favorites, group photo pools and interestingness, for which a patent is pending.

In March 2005, Yahoo! Inc. acquired Ludicorp and Flickr. During the week of June 28 all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, resulting in all data being subject to United States federal law.

On May 16, 2006 Flickr updated its services from Beta to "Gamma" along with a design and structural overhaul. According to the site's FAQ, the term "Gamma", rarely used in software development, is intended to be tongue-in-cheek to indicate that the service is always being tested by its users, and is in a state of perpetual improvement. For all intents and purposes, the current service is considered a stable release.

On December 29, 2006 the upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100MB a month (from 20MB) and were removed from Pro Accounts, permitting unlimited uploads for holders of these accounts (up from 2GB per month).

In January 2007, Flickr announced that the "Old Skool" members, those that pre-date the Yahoo acquisition, will be required to associate their account with a Yahoo ID by March 15 to continue using the service. This move was criticized by some users.

Flickr later added limits of 3,000 contacts and 75 tags for photos. Pre-existing accounts with over 3,000 contacts would not be able to add more until some are removed, with the same applying to tag limits. This contact limit no longer exists.

File:Flickr loves you logo.png

Flickr loves you logo

In June 2007 Flickr changed the tagline on the logo, which now reads 'Flickr LOVES YOU' instead of 'Flickr GAMMA'. [1]

Features

Organization

File:Screenshot-HotTags-Flickr.png

A screenshot of hot tags on Flickr.

Flickr allows photo submitters to categorize images by use of keyword "tags" (a form of metadata), which allow searchers to find images concerning a certain topic such as place name or subject matter. Also, Flickr was the first website to implement tag clouds which provide access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Because of its support for user-generated tags, Flickr repeatedly has been cited as a prime example of effective use of folksonomy, although Thomas Vander Wal suggested Flickr is not the best example of folksonomy.

Flickr also allows users to categorize their photos into "sets", or groups of photos that fall under the same heading. However, sets are more flexible than the traditional folder-based method of organizing files, as one photo can belong to one set, many sets, or none at all. (The concept is directly analogous to the "labels" in Google's Gmail.) Flickr's "sets", then, represent a form of categorical metadata rather than a physical hierarchy. Sets may be grouped into "collections", and collections further grouped into higher-order collections.

Finally, Flickr offers a fairly comprehensive web-service API that allows programmers to create applications that can perform almost any function a user on the Flickr site can do.

Organizr

Organizr is a web application for organizing photos within a Flickr account that can be accessed through the Flickr interface. It allows users to modify tags, descriptions, and set groupings, and to place photos on a world map (a feature provided in conjunction with Yahoo! Maps). It uses Ajax to closely emulate the look, feel, and quick functionality of desktop-based photo-management applications. Because of this, Organizr greatly simplifies the batch organization of photos, which is more cumbersome with the normal web interface.

Access control

Flickr provides both private and public image storage. A user uploading an image can set privacy controls that determine who can view the image. A photo can be flagged as either public or private. Private images are visible by default only to the uploader, but they can also be marked as viewable by friends and/or family. Privacy settings also can be decided by adding photographs from a user's photostream to a "group pool". If a group is private all the members of that group can see the photo. If a group is public the photo becomes public as well. Flickr also provides a "contact list" which can be used to control image access for a specific set of users in a way similar to that of LiveJournal.

In Fall 2006 Flickr created a "guest pass" system that allows private photos to be shared with non Flickr members. For instance, a person could email this pass to parents who may not have an account to allow them to see the photos otherwise restricted from public view. This setting allows sets to be shared, or all photos under a certain privacy category (friends or family) to be shared.

In March 2007, Flickr added new content filtering controls that let members specify by default what types of images they generally upload (photo, art/illustration, or screenshot) and how "safe" (i.e. unlikely to offend others) their images are, as well as specify that information for specific images individually. In addition, users can specify the same criteria when searching for images. There are some restrictions on searches for certain types of users: non-members must always use SafeSearch, which omits images noted as potentially offensive, while members whose Yahoo! accounts indicate that they are underage may use SafeSearch or moderate SafeSearch, but cannot turn SafeSearch off completely.

Many members allow their photos to be viewed by anyone, forming a large collaborative database of categorized photos. By default, other members can leave comments about any image they have permission to view, and in some cases can add to the list of tags associated with an image.

Interaction and compatibility

Flickr's functionality includes RSS and Atom feeds and an API that allows independent programmers to expand its services.

The core functionality of the site relies on standard HTML and HTTP features, allowing for wide compatibility among platforms and browsers. Organizr uses Ajax, with which most modern browsers are compliant, and most of Flickr's other text-editing and tagging interfaces also possess Ajax functionality.

Images can be posted to the user's collection via email attachments, enabling direct uploads from many cameraphones and applications with email capabilities.

Flickr has increasingly been adopted by many web users as their primary photo storage site, especially members of the weblog community. In addition, it is popular with Macintosh and Linux users, who are often locked out of photo-sharing sites because they require the Windows/Internet Explorer setup to work.

Flickr uses the Geo microformat on the pages for over 3 million geotagged images.

Flickr also lets members 'do more with your photos' through partnerships with third parties, offering streamlined printing of various forms of merchandise, including business cards, photo books, and large size prints.

Users of Windows Live Photo Gallery BETA now have the ability to upload their photos directly to Flickr.

Archiving

With an active free account, each user has access to only the most recent 200 images he or she has uploaded. Older images are not deleted, and are still accessible via their URLs (e.g. linked from another website); however, they will no longer be accessible to tag or edit from the user's Flickr account. Free accounts which are inactive for 90 consecutive days are automatically deleted.

Flickr Filter

In spring of 2007 Flickr introduced mandatory filtering of all photos and a process of central review of photos by staff to set levels of appropriateness. By default all Flickr accounts are set to the status appropriate for a minor and must be changed by the user in their account.

Flickr has since used this setting to change the level of accessibility to “unsafe” content for entire nations, including South Korea, Hong Kong, and Germany. German users staged a “revolt” over being assigned to the user rights of a minor in the summer of 2007.

The filter system of Flickr essentially assumes that everything is unsafe and should not be public until a staff person has validated that the material is safe. Until this happens material can not be viewed by persons without a valid Yahoo and Flickr account. There is no work around to this issue other than insuring that Flickr administration staff marks a site as safe. At time of writing this could take a month.

A Flickr site not marked as safe can only be viewed by people in the community who have set their filters beyond the default status of that of a “minor”.

Yahoo! Photos

Yahoo has announced that they will be shutting down Yahoo! Photos on September 20, 2007, after which all photos will be deleted. During the interim, users had the ability to migrate their photos to Flickr. All who migrated to Flickr were given three months of Flickr PRO account until September in time to officially close Yahoo! Photos.

Licensing

Flickr offers users the ability to release their images under certain common usage licenses. The licensing options primarily include the Creative Commons 2.0 attribution-based and minor content-control licenses - although jurisdiction and version-specific licenses cannot be selected. As with "tags", the site allows easy searching of only those images that fall under a specific license.

Integration with Yahoo Web Search

Since August 24, 2006, certain Yahoo! web searches will return image results from Flickr, for example "funny photos" or "travel photography".

Software architecture

Cal Henderson, a Flickr developer, revealed much of the service's backend in a 2005 PowerPoint presentation at the Vancouver PHP Association. The platform consisted of:

• PHP for core application logic
• Smarty Template Engine
• PEAR for XML & Email
• Perl for "controlling"
• ImageMagick
• MySQL 4.0
• Java for the node service
• Apache Web Server 2
• Adobe Flash
• Fotonotes for photo annotation

Censorship controversy

Main article: Censorship by Flickr

File:FlickrPhotosServerBlocked.JPG

Users in mainland China could not see any images in Flickr when they log in.

On June 12 2007, in the wake of the rollout of localized language version of the site, Flickr implemented a user-side rating system for filtering out potentially controversial photos. Simultaneously, users with accounts registered with Yahoo subsidiaries in Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea were prevented from viewing photos rated "moderate" or "restricted" on the three-part scale used. Many Flickr users, particularly German, protested against the new restrictions, claiming unwanted censorship from Flickr and Yahoo. [2]

Flickr management, unwilling to go into legal details, implied that the reason for the stringent filtering were unusually strict age-verification laws in Germany. The issue received some attention in the German national media, especially in online publications. Initial reports indicated that Flickr's action was a sensible, if unattractive, precaution against prosecution[3], although later coverage implied that Flickr's action may have been unnecessarily strict. [4]

On June 20 2007 Flickr reacted by granting German users access to "moderate", but not "restricted" images, and hinted at a future solution involving advanced age-verification procedures for Germany, though no mention was made of Singapore, Hong Kong or Korea.

Flickr is also blocked by the governments of some countries. Users in mainland China have been denied access to Flickr by Chinese ISPs since early June, 2007. Flickr is also completely blocked in the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and other Muslim countries (not including Turkey or Pakistan). Details of how to work around the block to access Flickr in all of these countries have appeared on the Web.

Disputed Copyright Issues

Virgin Mobile Ad Controversy

In 2007, Virgin Mobile launched a bus stop ad campaign promoting their cellphone text messaging service using the work of amateur photographers who uploaded their work to Flickr using a Creative Commons-by (Attribution) license. Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as the original creator was attributed credit, without any other compensation required. Virgin upheld this single restriction by printing URLs leading to the photographer's Flickr page on each of their ads. However, one picture, depicting 15 year-old Alison Chang at a fund-raising carwash for her church, caused some minor controversy when it was discovered that the photo was not taken by Chang, but by a friend, Justin Wong, who later uploaded the images to Flickr under the Creative Commons license. While the lenient licensing of the photograph would normally make it legal for Virgin to use in their advertisements, some felt that Wong's licensing of the image did not apply to Chang, since she had not signed a model release form beforehand. However, no legal action has yet been taken again Virgin.

Stolen photographs

Also in 2007, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, an Icelandic landscape photographer, discovered that a British company known as "Only Dreemin'" was selling several of her pictures in an eBay store, without her permission. When contacted, the company was reported to have immediately withdrawn the pictures. Only Dreemin' had no further contact with Guðleifsdóttir, but later claimed that the images were purchased from another company, and Only Dreemin' had no reason to question the copyright. The company made an estimated $4,700 USD selling her pictures, none of which Guðleifsdóttir was compensated for.

See also

• Image hosting service
• List of social networking websites
• Photo sharing
• User-generated content

External links

• Flickr
• FlickrBlog
• Ludicorp corporate website
• Flickrbits, a repository for third party plug-ins and API-based tools