I won’t apologize for my unabashed love for flickr, having been there from its first month in 2004 and still using it almost daily. But this is not about me, but a corner of flickr I hope more people take advantage of the flickr commons that features public domain images from more than 100 collections (museums, archives, etc). Check it out!
The new landing page features a random image on each visit and is part of the flickr commons revitalization we noted last year. It’s landing page previously had an unidentified photo of a green bench (link from Internet Archive)
For a small project I dug around the source code, and found the source of the photo is one shared by George Oates, the founder of Flickr Commons who has returned to lead the broader open efforts of the Flickr Foundation.
Sure many people seek the snazzy photo styles from Unsplash/Pexels et al or are resorting to the AI generated ones, but I remain deeply fascinated by the photos in flickr commons. I find them very useful and are out of the norm of what others typically use for media. What’s even more interesting is that when you look into the link for a photo from the commons, you see often comment from visitors who add much more context to information to a shared photo.
That’s how a commons should work!
I use it so much, I built a little web browser bookmarklet so I search the flickr commons from any web page I am visiting (that’s why I sought the bench image)
Add flickr commons to your open image search kit. You could be eagerly showing it to friends like these dancers (the story is in the caption).
