The Flickr Foundation

And of course, it's possible to upload your own under open license, if you want to preserve them in that way. The most common is Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike.

I gave up on Flickr this year.

Some time early next year I've had a Flickr Pro account for 20 years. For about 17-18 of those years, Flickr hasn't made much of an effort, and when I think about it, I'm a bit cross with myself for having given them my money for so long with so little in return. I should have stopped giving them my money more than a decade ago. And so should everyone else so that whoever has been in charge over the years got an actual incentive to get off their asses and do something about the site. To at least develop a vision that is something other than "let's coast for a couple of decades".

I know there have been attempts to revive it, but they have, at best, been anemic and episodic.

For the first 10 years I stayed there in order to keep in contact with all the people I had gotten to know in the first couple of years. In the brief period when Flickr was a good place to meet people also interested in photography. People gradually disappeared over that decade. Flickr became a ghost-town. I remember browsing it now and then to see who was still around.

The next decade I stayed on because I didn't want the photos I had uploaded to just vanish from the web. Which is a nonsense reason because I have all of the photos in my archive anyway, so I can just re-upload them somewhere else.

For me to come back to Flickr whoever owns it now has to demonstrate that they are serious about creating a photography site. It has to be fast, it has to be photography focused, it has to offer navigation/discovery that isn't slow and ugly and clumsy. And perhaps it has to also cater to the intersection between blogs and photography as a lot of the more interesting photography sites I follow now are really blogs.

The community that once existed is gone. It won't come back. People have moved on. That doesn't mean that there can't be a new community. But it takes some doing.

It is definitely the plan for the .com to continue as a commercial enterprise.

The .org is a new organization, a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. There's minority company representation on our Board, and we have all the official governance things like by-laws set up. The .com has funded the establishment of the .org to date, for which we are profoundly grateful, and we all expect and hope to diversify the .org revenue from now on.

Both parties are aware of, and working to ensure, that the .org can also be independent of the .com if and when it needs to be. We would like to avoid the risk of a new CEO coming in and shutting it all down, as we are witnessing now in other arenas!