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Flickr and its parent company SmugMug have announced its expanding its efforts to promote and preserve historic and culturally significant photographs for future generations through The Flickr Foundation, a new US 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
The groundwork for the organization was laid back in 2008, when George Oates, a designer at Flickr, wanted to develop a program specifically designed to allow cultural institutions from around the world to share their image collections. In collaboration with the United States Library of Congress, The Commons was created.
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| A screenshot of the Flickr Commons website. |
According to Oates, The Commons was created with two main goals. ‘Firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world; and secondly, to facilitate the collection of knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information would feed back into the catalogs, making them richer and easier to search.’
As Flickr has gone through various owners in the years since, The Commons has come under threat of being shuttered. That changed though when Don and Ben MacAskill, founders of SmugMug, came in possession of Flickr after SmugMug’s acquisition back in 2018.
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| (June 1983) Astronaut Sally K. Ride, mission specialist on STS-7, monitors control panels from the pilot’s chair on the Flight Deck. Floating in front of her is a flight procedures notebook. Image Number: S83-35783 Date: June 18-24, 1983 |
‘The idea that tens of billions of photos would just disappear — we couldn’t let that happen,’ says MacAskill. ‘We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was an amazing business opportunity — it was losing staggering amounts of money, and nobody else seemed interested in the potential. Instead, we bought Flickr because we’ve built our company around a love for photography, and we couldn’t imagine an internet without Flickr.’
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| The announcing of the armistice on November 11, 1918, was the occasion for a monster celebration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Thousands massed on all sides of the replica of the Statue of Liberty on Broad Street, and cheered unceasingly. Philadelphia Public Ledger., 1917 – 1919 |
The Flickr Foundation will sustain and support the Flickr Commons program and is being launched with four major tenets of cultural preservation at its core: Flickr Commons, content mobility, creative archiving, and fostering new curators. With an emphasis on these four pillars of preservation, the ‘mission is to develop and sustain an accessible social and technical infrastructure to protect this invaluable collection for future generations.’
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| The 100-year plan, summarized by The Flickr Foundation. |
At the heart of this mission is a ‘100-year plan,’ with a goal to help Flickr survive for generations to come. The plan is still being developed, but you can keep up with further developments on The Flickr Foundation’s 100-year plan webpage.
George Oates will serve as Executive Director of the non-profit, while Ryan Merkley, former CEO at Creative Commons and Chief of Staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, and Stephanie McVey, SmugMug + Flickr’s Chief Financial Officer, both serve on the board.
You can find out more about The Flickr Foundation by visiting Flickr.org.
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This article comes from DP Review and can be read on the original site.
