However, Flickr’s heyday now seems to be over, with the most recent statistics being released by Flickr in 2014 stating that only 1 million images were now being uploaded each day ( Etherington 2014). It was a website that rode the Web 2.0 wave extremely successfully, continually adding new features and listening to feedback from users, and it was always more popular than rival photo hosting sites such as Picasa, Photobucket, SmugMug, Shutterfly, and Photoshelter. The timing for Flickr was perfect, and it soon became ‘one of the internet’s biggest repositories of photographs’ ( Wray and Johnson 2008), thus making it an important digital cultural repository to explore and evaluate.Īt the height of its popularity in around 2010, 3,000 images were being uploaded to Flickr every minute ( Flickr 2010), which equated to approximately 4.3 million images each day. Thus, a new knowledge organization system was born, creating a place for the management and retrieval of people’s images. Flickr also provided a platform for people who were passionate about photography to share their images with other people who were also passionate about photography at the exact same time that digital cameras first began to outsell analog cameras ( Weinberger 2007, 12). Similarly, with Flickr, it was the users of the website itself who generated the content (i.e., the images), and they were drawn to the site because of the innovative new features if offered such as the use of photostreams, tags, favorites, and groups ( McCracken 2014). Rather than being passive consumers of information on websites, the consumers themselves now began generating the content for websites such as YouTube (videos), Wikipedia (collaborative articles), and Twitter (thoughts and ideas). This change became known as Web 2.0, and the term was widely used from 2004 up until around 2008 ( Google Trends 2018) to refer to a fundamental shift in the way that people created and shared information online. 20a Cox, Clough and Siersdorfer 2010) as it provided the perfect mix of new and innovative features that piqued people’s interest at a time of significant change on the Web. Whilst Flickr’s creators originally intended for it to be a massive multiplayer online game (called Game Neverending), it was the image sharing aspect of the game that unexpectedly became more popular, and so the original game idea was abandoned, thus allowing for the development of Flickr.įlickr is credited as being one of the ‘first classic Web 2.0 sites’ ( Van House et al.
Factors that have contributed to Flickr’s demise in popularity will be explored, and the article finishes with some suggestions for how Flickr could develop in the future, along with some conclusions for image organization.įlickr ( ) - from the English word flick, meaning to flick through something - is an image- and video-hosting website that was launched in 2004 by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Flake. This article examines the links between Flickr’s success and how images are organized within the site, as well as the types of people and organizations that use Flickr and their motivations for doing so. Conclusions for knowledge organizationįlickr was launched when digital cameras first began to outsell analog cameras, and people were drawn to the site for the opportunities it offered them to store, organize, and share their images, as well as for the connections that could be made with other like-minded people. Success and knowledge organization in FlickrĢ.3 Application programming interface (API)Ħ.
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