When was flickr created

So they had to scale back any grandiose ambitions. They confronted the same chicken-egg problem any inherently social business faces.

For a user to benefit, others had to be on the same instant messaging client. But how do you get that initial stream of users? The answer was to create a primitive social network with photo-share capability and incorporate tagging to organize photographs. This took advantage of two powerful trends that were converging. First, digital cameras were getting cheaper and more powerful by the month, and naturally people wanted to display them online. Fake, an amateur photographer and professional web designer, knew firsthand the nightmare of organizing thousands of photos on a hard drive.

Before tagging she was faced with a seemingly intractable organizational mess—endless lists of JPEG files with no effective way to place them into context. She could, of course, organize them into folders, but that was merely a binary solution to an infinitely more comple organizational challenge. The earliest members came from the Game Neverending community, and Fake made it a point to greet everyone who entered the site to introduce him or her to someone else.

She viewed online social interaction as if it was a cocktail party and she was the hostess. 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! 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, making it a better tool for batch editing than the standard Flickr interface.

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. 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. 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 , Flickr created a "guest pass" system that allows private photos to be shared with non-Flickr members. A person could e-mail 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. 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.

This includes a large number of third-party Greasemonkey scripts which enhance and extend the functionality of the Flickr site. In Flickr was the second most Greasemonkey-extended site. 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 photostream via email attachments, enabling direct uploads from many cameraphones and applications with email capabilities.

Flickr has been adopted by many web users as their primary photo storage site, especially members of the blogging community.

In addition, it is popular with Macintosh and Linux users, who are locked out of photo-sharing sites that require Windows and Internet Explorer. Flickr uses the Geo microformat on the pages for over 3 million geotagged images. Flickr has entered into partnerships with third parties to offer 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.

In addition, Flickr has partnered with Getty Images to sell stock photos from some users. They can also automatically update their status on other Social networking service when they upload their images to Flickr. However, the service doesn't handle Facebook's long-life access tokens appropriately, failing silently on stale tokens and preventing sharing functionality as a result.

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.

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!

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. In summer , German users staged a "revolt" over being assigned to the user rights of a minor.

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. As with " tags ", the site allows easy searching of only those images that fall under a specific license.

In addition to using commercial mapping data, Flickr now uses OpenStreetMap mapping for various cities; this began with Beijing during the run-up to the Olympic games. In May , Flickr added an option to easily reverse an account termination. This action was motivated by a very public accidental deletion of a Flickr user's account, and its very protracted restoration.

According to the company, as of August [update] Flickr is hosted on 62 databases across servers , with about , user accounts per pair of servers. On 12 June , in the wake of the rollout of localized language versions 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 in Germany, protested against the new restrictions, claiming unwanted censorship from Flickr and Yahoo. Flickr management, unwilling to go into legal details, implied that the reason for the stringent filtering was some unusually strict age-verification laws in Germany. The issue received 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, [ 57 ] although later coverage implied that Flickr's action may have been unnecessarily strict.

On 20 June , Flickr reacted by granting German users access to "moderate" but not "restricted" images, and hinted at a future solution for Germany, involving advanced age-verification procedures. On 1 June , Flickr was blocked in China in advance of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of In , Virgin Mobile launched a bus stop advertising campaign which promoted its 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 being required. Intuitively, it seemed possible that she might care more about Flickr than her immediate predecessors had. And in the Mayer regime, Flickr has indeed snapped out of its long slumber. Yahoo has released nicely-done apps for iPhone and Android, bringing the service into the modern mobile era.

It also unveiled a much more contemporary-feeling redesign and started offering a terabyte of space for free — a mammoth amount of space even by current standards. With the 1TB upgrade, Flickr now lets everybody see all their photos, rather than hiding all but the most recent ones, as it had long done for non-paying customers.

But as with any product, the fact that it inspires passion is ultimately a good sign. Our goal and our strategy is to build the best possible photo product in the world.

What we are building is something that helps users with their photos really holistically. That means more features, which means more engineers. The top four cameras used by Flickr photographers are all iPhones. Even with more resources, Flickr can never again be what it once was: the undisputed leader in photo sharing.

It hosts 1. Fascinating things continue to happen there, such as a formerly unknown species of insect being identified based on its Flickr portrait. Contact us at letters time. The Flickr homepage as it appeared in , the year of the service's birth. Way before Instagram lived Flickr. Flickr acts as more than a photo hosting service; its groups and organisational tools have united people with common interests and bridged gaps between photography enthusiasts from all over the world.

Flickr started life in as a product of Ludicorp and its founders, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. It was focused mostly on image hosting and had a chat room for real time photo sharing which was dropped soon afterwards.

Photos, slowly started to be phased out, and users were offered a three months free trial of the premium Flickr accounts should they switch over.