Flickr: what is it?

Flickr (stylized as flickr)

is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.

In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.

Yahoo reported in June 2011 that Flickr had a total of 51 million registered members and 80 million unique visitors.

In August 2011 the site reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images and this number continues to grow steadily according to reporting sources.

Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need to register an account but an account must be made in order to upload content onto the website.

Registering an account also allows users to create a profile page containing photos and videos that the user has uploaded and also grants the ability to add another Flickr user as a contact.

For mobile users, Flickr has an official app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7 operating systems.






On their page.

About Flickr

Flickr - almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world - has two main goals:

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

Maybe they want to keep a blog of moments captured on their cameraphone, or maybe they want to show off their best pictures or video to the whole world in a bid for web celebrity. Or maybe they want to securely and privately share photos of their kids with their family across the country. Flickr makes all these things possible and more!

To do this, we want to get photos and video into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users' home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their content. And we want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven't thought of yet. What else are we going to use those smart refrigerators for?

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

Once you make the switch to digital, it is all too easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer number of photos you take or videos you shoot with that itchy trigger finger. Albums, the principal way people go about organizing things today, are great -- until you get to 20 or 30 or 50 of them. They worked in the days of getting rolls of film developed, but the "album" metaphor is in desperate need of a Florida condo and full retirement.

Part of the solution is to make the process of organizing photos or videos collaborative. In Flickr, you can give your friends, family, and other contacts permission to organize your stuff - not just to add comments, but also notes and tags. People like to ooh and ahh, laugh and cry, make wisecracks when sharing photos and videos. Why not give them the ability to do this when they look at them over the internet? And as all this info accretes as metadata, you can find things so much easier later on, since all this info is also searchable.

Flickr continues to evolve in myriad ways, all of which are designed to make it easier and better. Check out theFlickr Blog to stay apprised of the latest developments. The fact that you've read to the end of this entire document and are hanging out at the bottom of this page with nothing but this silly text to keep you company is proof of a deep and abiding interest on your part. What are you waiting for? Sign up now!

FLICKR a History

Flickr was launched in February 2004 by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake.

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; however, Butterfield has since launched an online game of similar intent.


Early versions of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities.

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 backend 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.

Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr in March 2005. The reported acquisition cost was $35 million. During the week of June 26 – July 2, 2005, all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, resulting in all data becoming 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.  A further connotation, more specific to photography and the display of images, is that of gamma correction.

The current service is considered a stable release.

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

In January 2007, Flickr announced that "Old Skool" members—those who had joined before the Yahoo acquisition—would 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.

On April 9, 2008, Flickr began allowing paid subscribers to upload videos, limited to 90 seconds in length and 150 MB in size.

On March 2, 2009, Flickr added the facility to upload and view HD videos, and began allowing free users to upload normal-resolution video. At the same time, the set limit for free accounts was lifted.