A Useful Guide to Free Photos, Media & More

FLICKR

FLICKR

www.flickr.com

A useful guide to free photos needs to include Flickr, the world's largest online photo management and sharing resource, created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Flickr claims it is, "... home to 13 billion photos, 120 million people, and 2 million groups." On 25 July 2016, Verizon announced that it had entered a deal to acquire Yahoo and Flickr. The deal is expected to close in 2017.

According to its website, Flickr has two main goals:

1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.

2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.

Flickr does not want to offer photos for commercial use; they tried the Flickr Marketplace licensing program, but nobody liked it. They reported: "Over the past year we have received feedback from our contributors regarding their experience around licensing and royalties. It was our hope to create the right Marketplace for our contributors, but based on this feedback, we understand there is more work to be done. As a result, the Flickr Marketplace licensing program is closed."

Their guidelines are altruistic, and they encourage people to play nice. They don't want photographers to post inappropriate artwork because children visit the site. They don't want people to spam or nag or insult each other.

When a photographer uploads a photo to Flickr, they can opt to use a Creative Commons license, which grants varying degrees of permission to the user.

The problem I foresee with Flickr, however, is when someone changes their mind about the license they've applied to their photos and goes back and changes it. If this has happened, and you've already downloaded and used a Flickr photo (properly at the time), then you could be violating a copyright or license.

Flickr is routinely dredged by another one of my favorite places to look for artwork, Wikimedia Commons, but I'll speak about that in another chapter.

I have photos on Flickr, but I don't use the service often. It's a personal choice; I don't have time to bother, and I'm not a fan of Yahoo. I prefer Google. With the recent breach of its users' information, I feel vindicated, although I'm also a bit worried. My husband uses Yahoo so there goes all our private info.