Accounts Flickr has always offered two types of accounts: free and paid. Until January 7, 2019, free accounts had up to 1 TB of storage. On January 8, 2019, the account offerings changed. The free option is limited to 1,000 photos or videos stored, with videos limited to three minutes. After January 8, 2019, members over the limit could no longer upload new photos to Flickr. On February 5, 2019, a free account's older content would be deleted automatically if it contains more than 1,000 photos and they do not subscribe to the paid service tier, with the exception of content that was already uploaded with a
Creative Commons copyright license before November 1, 2018. The paid option features "unlimited" storage, advanced statistics, advertising-free browsing, videos up to 10 minutes in length, "premier" customer service, and promotional offers with other partners. In May 2011, Flickr added an option to easily reverse an account termination, motivated by the accidental deletion of a Flickr user's account, and public reporting of its protracted restoration. Flickr may delete accounts without giving any reason or warning to the account's owner. As a result of the
SmugMug buyout, Flickr added the ability for users to download all of their account data, such as photo albums, contacts, and comments. On April 15, 2025, Flickr announced to restrict downloads of original and large-size images (larger than 1024 px) owned by free accounts since May 15, Creative Commons-licensed photos and Flickr Commons members will not be affected.
Organization The images a photographer uploads to Flickr go into their sequential "photostream", the basis of a Flickr account. All photostreams can be displayed as a justified view, a
slide show, a "detail" view or a date stamped archive. Clicking on a photostream image opens it in the interactive "photopage" alongside data, comments and facilities for embedding images on external sites. Users may label their uploaded images with titles and descriptions, and images may be
tagged, either by the uploader or by other users, if the uploader permits it. These text components enable computer searching of Flickr. Flickr was an early website to implement
tag clouds, which were used until 2013, providing access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Tagging was further revised in the photopage redesign of March 2014. Flickr has been cited as a prime example of effective use of
folksonomy. Users can organize their Flickr photos into "albums" (formerly "sets") which are more flexible than the traditional folder-based method of organizing files, as one photo can belong to one album, many albums, or none at all. Flickr provides code to embed albums into blogs, websites and forums. Flickr albums represent a form of categorical
metadata rather than a physical hierarchy.
Geotagging can be applied to photos in albums, and any albums with geotagging can be related to a map using imapflickr. The resulting map can be embedded in a website. Flickr albums may be organized into "collections", which can themselves be further organized into higher-order collections. 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 emulate the look, feel and quick functionality of desktop-based photo-management applications, such as Google's
Picasa and
F-Spot. Users can select and apply changes to multiple photos at a time, as an alternative to the standard Flickr interface for editing.
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 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 November 2006, Flickr created a "guest pass" system that allows private photos to be shared with non-Flickr members. This setting allows sets or all photos under a certain privacy category (friends or family) to be shared. 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 many cases, can add to the list of tags associated with an image.
Interaction and compatibility The core functionality of the site relies on standard
HTML and
HTTP features, allowing for wide compatibility among
platforms and
browsers; Flickr's functionality includes
RSS and
Atom feeds and an
API that enables independent programmers to expand its services. This includes a large number of third-party
Greasemonkey scripts that enhance and extend the functionality of Flickr. In 2006, Flickr was the second most extended site on userscripts.org. Organizr and most of Flickr's other text-editing and tagging interfaces use
Ajax, with which most modern browsers are compliant. Images can be posted to the user's photostream via email attachments, which enables direct uploads from many smartphones and applications. Flickr uses the
Geo microformat on over three million
geotagged images. According to the company, Flickr is hosted on 62 databases across 124 servers, with about 800,000 user accounts per pair of servers. Based on information compiled by highscalability.com, the
MySQL databases are hosted on servers that are
Linux-based (from
Red Hat), with a software platform that includes
Apache,
PHP (with PEAR and
Smarty),
shards,
Memcached,
Squid,
Perl,
ImageMagick and
Java; the system administration tools include
Ganglia,
SystemImager, Subcon, and
CVSup. Signed-in Flickr users can "Follow" the Photostreams of other Flickr photographers. Reciprocating this process is optional. A user's homepage contains a stream of their Contacts' photos at 2/3 screen size. Groups are another major means of interaction with fellow members of Flickr around common photography interests. A Flickr Group can be started by any Flickr user, who becomes its administrator and can appoint moderators. Groups may either be open access or invitation-only, and most have an associated pool of photos. The administrator of the Flickr group can monitor and set restrictions for the group, assign awards to members, and may curate and organize the photo content. Recent uploads to a group will sometimes appear on its members' homepages. Group photo pools may be displayed in the "Justified View" or as a slideshow. "Galleries" of photos from other photostreams may be curated by any signed-up Flickr user, provided the feature is not disabled by the photo's uploader, these are then publicly viewable. Flickr provides a desktop client for
Mac OS X and Windows that allows users to upload photos without using the web interface. Uploadr allows drag-and-drop batch uploading of photos, the setting of tags and descriptions for each batch, and the editing of privacy settings. Flickr has entered into partnerships with many third parties: • Flickr had a partnership with the
Picnik online photo-editing application that included a reduced-feature version of Picnik built into Flickr as a default photo editor. On April 5, 2012, Flickr replaced Picnik with
Aviary as its default photo editor. • In addition to commercial mapping data, Flickr now uses
OpenStreetMap mapping for various cities; this began with Beijing during the run-up to the 2008 Olympic games. , this is used for Baghdad, Beijing, Kabul, Sydney and Tokyo. OpenStreetMap data is collected by volunteers and is available under the
Open Database License. • Flickr offers printing of various forms of merchandise, including business cards, photo books, stationery, personalized credit cards and large-size prints from companies such as
Moo,
Blurb,
Tiny Prints,
Capital One,
Imagekind, and
QOOP. • The Flickr partnership with
Getty Images to sell stock photos from users is under review as of early 2014.
Filtering 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), how "safe" (i.e., unlikely to offend) their images are, and specify that information for specific images individually. Individual images are assigned to one of three categories: "safe", "moderate" and "restricted". Flickr has used this filtering system to change the level of accessibility to "unsafe" content for entire nations, including
South Korea, Hong Kong and Germany. In summer 2007, German users staged a "revolt" over being assigned the user rights of a
minor.
Licensing license use on Flickr as of 2009 Flickr offers users the ability to either release their images under certain common usage
licenses or label them as "
all rights reserved". 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. On January 16, 2008, Flickr launched a program called "The Commons on Flickr." Several international cultural institutions share images using a "no known copyright restrictions" through the program. According to Flickr, the goal of the program is to "firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer." Participants include the
National Museum of Denmark,
Powerhouse Museum,
George Eastman Museum,
Library of Congress,
Nationaal Archief,
National Archives and Records Administration,
National Library of Scotland,
State Library of New South Wales, and
Smithsonian Institution. In May 2009,
White House official photographer
Pete Souza began using Flickr as a conduit for releasing White House photos. The photos were initially posted with a
Creative Commons Attribution license requiring that the original photographers be credited. Flickr later created a new license which identified them as "
United States Government Work", which does not carry any copyright restrictions. In March 2015, Flickr added the
Creative Commons Public Domain Mark and
Creative Commons Zero (CC0) to its licensing options. The Public Domain Mark is meant for images that are no longer protected by copyright. CC0 is used for works that are still protected by copyright or neighbouring rights, but where the rightsholders choose to waive all those rights. ==Reception==