Founded back in 2004, Flickr has changed owners several times through the years as the social media and photo-sharing landscape evolved. Here are 10 reasons why I believe Flickr is still the best site on the Web for photographers.

#1. Photo URLs

Each photo you upload gets its own unique URL page, chock full of information about the photo including all metadata embedded with your photo on upload. Also included are links to different size versions of your photos including your full high res original image. These unique url pages include tags and geo-locational data, and they elegantly showcase the photograph, including the ability to magnify the photo and look at details from this page.

#2. Unlimited Storage

Flickr allows unlimited storage. You will never run out of space or be charged more money as your photo library grows.

#3. Ad Free

Flickr offers an ad-free browsing experience for both you as well as any visitors to your photos/stream.

#4. Open API

Flickr has an open API that allows developers to develop functionality on top of the site. I’m able to use SuprSetr to organize all of my photos by keywords into albums automatically. At present, I have almost 5,000 albums. SuprSetr makes managing them a breeze.

#5. Social Metadata

Flickr allows others the ability to interact with your photos generating rich new information that I call “social metadata” around photos.

I upload found vernacular photographs and a robust community frequently is able to identify locations and even families and people in my collections and share this information with me and others on the photo’s page.

#6. Good Owners

Flickr is run and managed by the MacAskills, who also own SmugMug. Don and Ben MacAskill are trusted friends of photographers who have decades of experience managing online photo websites and communities. They have a deep respect for photography and photographers and have expressed a desire to help preserve the Flickr archive as long as possible into the future. They recently helped establish the @flickrfoundation which is focusing on preserving important work for all time. They are thoughtful, good, decent people who you can trust with your photos.

#7. Flexible Licenses

Flickr allows a variety of licenses for you to use with your photos. You can use the default “all rights reserved” license if you want or you can use a variety of Creative Commons licenses which allow more generous ways for you to share your photos with the world if you so choose. I personally use Creative Commons Non-Commercial for my photos.

#8. Wonderful Community

There is a wonderful community of photographers at Flickr. Perhaps not as robust as it was in years past, Flickr still has a wonderful group of photographers that I interact with daily. I have met many of my best friends over the years first on Flickr. Flickr is a very social place where you can get to know other people and photographers and engage and interact and make lots of interesting new friends who share a love of photography both through their individual photo pages and Flickr groups.

#9. Longevity

Flickr has been around for over 19 years. It will celebrate its 20th birthday next year. They are the OG photo-sharing site. Other sites have come and gone but Flickr persists. This also means that Flickr is one of the most important highly organized searchable databases of photographs in the world having been a place where photos have lived for that long. It’s impossible to underestimate the importance of this large body of work for humankind. It’s an amazing collection of some of the most important images in the world.

#10. Profile Pages

Flickr offers each user their own profile page. This page includes photos you choose to highlight as well as your most favorited photos on Flickr. It’s a great place for other photographers and people to learn more about you.

While Flickr is a paid service (good things are worth paying for) it does also offer a free version which allows you to try the service out with up to 1,000 photos. It has a mobile app as well but I prefer the web experience myself and that’s how I use it mostly.

Bonus: Fantastic Support

The support on Flickr is first-rate. Not only do they have a help forum where users can help each other and where staff can assist as well, but you can also reach out directly when needed. The support team is friendly, professional, helpful, and knowledgeable.

About the author: Thomas Hawk is a photographer and blogger based in San Francisco. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Visit his website here and his Flickr photostream here.

• Iván Silva won the grand prize at the 2023 iPhone Photography Awards.
• Silva, from Mexico City, said he used YouTube tutorials to teach himself photography.
• He says he prefers using a phone to a traditional camera as it is easy to travel with.

Iván Silva may be an award-winning photographer, but he says he’s not a professional. 

Silva, 37, was announced as the Grand Prize Winner of the 16th annual iPhone Photography Awards earlier this month.

Silva, from Mexico City, beat thousands of entries from around the world with an image of his young nephew celebrating Argentina’s 2o22 World Cup victory, according to a post on the iPhone Photography Awards’ Instagram account. 

Speaking to Insider, Silva said the photo of his nephew standing on a truck was taken a couple of days after the World Cup in December 2022 while his family was vacationing in Arandas, Jalisco, in Mexico. Some of the family were collecting wood for a bonfire when Silva’s nephew, wearing a Messi jersey, stood on top of the truck in celebration, he said.

Silva says he started photography 5 years ago as a hobby

Speaking to Insider, Silva said he began taking photos as a “hobby” five years ago and is self-taught; he used YouTube tutorials and movies, and studied professional photographers to help hone his craft. 

These days, Silva said he only has time to photograph on the weekends or while on vacation as he has a demanding job. He works within the judicial system in Mexico and also recently welcomed a newborn son, he said.

And while he initially used a traditional camera, Silva says he now mostly prefers his phone camera as it is more “comfortable” and “easy” to travel with.

“This is the first time I have participated in an international photography contest,” Silva said. He added that he previously applied to contests in Mexico but with “no results.”

“When I found out I was a winner by email, my wife was taking a bath while I was taking care of baby. I was so excited that I didn’t read the whole message. I shouted and told my wife I won — she was very scared and thought something happened to the baby,” Silva said. 

“She said she’ll never forget that day because of the scare she had because of my screams,” he added.

Silva said he initially thought he had won the childhood category, and it took around an hour for him to realize he had won the grand prize.

In addition to the grand prize and the three runners-up, the competition also shortlists winners from numerous categories including abstract, animals, architecture, and children, as shown on the contest’s website. Most entries are amateurs since the contest is open to all iPhone users, a spokesperson for the iPhone Photography Awards told Insider. 

Silva’s photo was chosen because it captures the inspiration, hope, and dreams of childhood, the spokesperson said. 

“His hero, Lionel Messi, came from very difficult circumstances but became the best and so many kids resonate with this,” they added. “The hope he embodies is the biggest gift one human can give another.”

Orillia-based scholar Valerie Hébert served as an author and editor for a new book called Framing the Holocaust: Photographs of a Mass Shooting in Latvia, 1941.

The Lakehead University professor is one of eight contributors to the book, which takes a deep dive into 12 photographs that document a mass shooting of Jewish people on a beach in Latvia in December 1941.

“When a lot of people think about the Holocaust, they think of Auschwitz and they think of trains,” Hébert said. “Before the death camps were built, the mass killings began with mobile shooting squads that combed through the Eastern Front as the Nazi army advanced.”

Hébert says the mobile shooting squads would gather alleged racial and political enemies and shoot them to death. More than a million people were killed using this terrorizing tactic.

“These 12 photographs show the sequential steps in one of these shooting actions,” she explained. “Jews were brought to this place, were made to undress. They were separated into smaller groups and brought to a ditch that was dug parallel with the sea, and they were shot. Their bodies fell into the ditch.”

Four men are connected to the photographs, but it’s unknown for sure who took them. The photos were turned in to the Soviet investigators by a Jewish Latvian man and are commonly used today in Holocaust museums but are rarely attributed to the correct time and place.

“This book provides an in-depth study and the historical context for these photos,” Hébert said.

In 2017, Hébert organized a workshop at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on atrocity photography.

“Photographs are sort of at the cutting edge of Holocaust research in particular,” she said. “There is more and more interest in this field of atrocity photography.”

She invited scholars from Canada, the U.S., Germany and Australia to the two-week workshop to talk about their work in atrocity photography and to look at materials from the museum.

“The idea was to put together a book where we are all speaking about the same images,” she said. “We chose these 12 photos because it’s rare to have so many in a clear sequence.”

The images show partially clothed and naked women and children caught in moments of terror.

“They really push us to the edge of what it is we can bear to look at,” she said. “The key question of the book is if they are so unbearable to look at, why should we even engage with them? What can we gain from them? And what can they tell us?”

Each author in the book brings a different question to the photos.

For Hébert, studying photos goes back to her childhood. Her interest in history comes from looking through her grandfather’s Time Life coffee table book of photographs from the 20th century.

“From the time I was little, I would look at this book and would be really drawn to photographs,” she said.

Hébert, who has a PhD in history, uses photographs often in her teaching at Lakehead University.

“I’ve taught Holocaust courses, I’ve taught courses on the world wars, and at first I was always uneasy about showing photographs of dead bodies and people in distress,” she said.

“There are some really important questions around these people not giving their consent to be photographed. A lot of times, the photographs are a part of the torture and humiliation because the photographer is using the moment to deepen their suffering.”

Through the process of creating the book, Hébert asked herself if bringing light to the photographs continued the humiliation and horror of victims. She also asked herself if the pictures were important evidence that help people understand history.

“The chapter that I contributed to the book looks at that ethical question,” she said. “Should we look at these? Should we not? And what are the arguments on both sides?”

The chapter sets the stage for all of the following chapters in the book, and Hébert hopes readers who pick up the book will gain a new appreciation for how rich and complex photographs are.

“We have this idea that photographs tell us everything, the truth is on its surface, and we understand everything by looking at the photograph, but we don’t,” she said. “So, it’s really important to consider who took the photograph, who was the intended audience, and what that might mean.”

While the photographs in the book were taken as a celebration of the crime, they’re also an indictment, which makes it important to understand the many meanings photographs hold, Hébert says.

“It helps us think more critically about historical photographs that we see,” she said. “We are a more visual culture now with social media and Instagram. It’s all image based now.”

She says photographs can transcend language, time and geography, which makes it important to have a more critical and nuanced way of understanding pictures while being aware of their ethical complications, which makes people better consumers of present-day photojournalism.

“The ones in the book help us understand this particular event in the Holocaust,” she said. “The way that the authors model how we read and interpret these photographs, there is a lot of crossover to how you may engage in photographs of other historical events or present-day crises and human rights issues.”

Framing the Holocaust: Photographs of a Mass Shooting in Latvia, 1941 will be available for purchase on Amazon starting Aug. 22.

Local artists and photographers will be exhibiting for the next two weeks at the Southeastern Indiana art gallery in Aurora Indiana. All art will be for sale.

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Looking for something to do? Our Art Guild will be exhibiting local artists and photographers art work at the gallery located at 302 Second Street Aurora IN opening Saturay August 5th through the 19th. No admission charge and our building is handicap accessible. Depending on what side of town you are from in the Cincinnati area, it is a 35-55 minute highway drive. Come to see what we’re all about. We are highlighting some welded sculpture work by doctor Randy LaDuc from Dillsboro/Lawrenceburg Indiana. You won’t want to miss it.

Venue

Southeastern Indiana Art Guild

302 Second Street (corner Of 2nd And Main)

Aurora

47001

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Dates

The event runs from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM on the following dates.
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