Flickr

Flickr was launched in February 2004 by Ludicorp. Initially, the service arose as a tool created for the game “Game Neverending”, a massively multiplayer online game in which players could save images, post them on personal pages on the Internet and show each other ^[6] . But flickr turned out to be a more workable project, and eventually Game Neverending was delayed. The authors of the project, Stuart Butterfield and Katerina Fake, saw the potential in the social aspect of photography, so the idea of ​​“flickr” ^{[7] appeared} . In 2005, the service was purchased by Yahoo! . The service has improved the design and structure of the site, and the site’s readiness version has changed from beta to gamma. As it turned out later, the term “gamma”, extremely rarely used in the field of developers, means that visitors are actively using the site and according to their wishes it is constantly being improved. In December 2006, data storage limits were increased and restrictions on the contact list were eliminated. In 2007, Yahoo! Photos was eliminated with all photos except those photos that were transferred to flickr using a special promotion hosted by Yahoo! before liquidation.

May 20, 2013 Flickr introduced a redesigned design and additional features, including 1 terabyte of free space without a limit on the number of photos (previous restrictions: 100MB per month, displaying only the last 200 photos and only in reduced resolution), seamless display of photos, photo cover and updated application for Android system ^[8] .

On April 20, 2018, SmugMug announced the purchase of Flickr. ^[five]

On November 1, 2018, the new Flickr service team announced a reduction in the number of user photos of a free account to 1000 photos (from the previous volume of 1 Terabyte). Those users who have more than 1000 photos are invited to switch to a paid service or download extra photos back ^[9] .

Storage

A registered user of the system can post their photos to a remote server. A free service implies the ability to upload 1 terabyte of photos. To each photo, its owner can add a name, a brief description and keywords (tag) for further search . You can take notes on the photos themselves. If a photograph depicts several objects (for example, several buildings), then you can select any of the objects and add a description to it.

Organization and Navigation

A photograph may have the status of a personal, family, group, or public. The photo can be found by keywords specified by the user. For example, a search for the keyword “ Moscow ” will return a list of links to all photos to which their owners attached the corresponding tag. The system allows you to search simultaneously for several keywords. Of additional interest is the opportunity to use collections of your photos or individual photos on the pages of your sites or your LiveJournal. In order to get the html-code of the link to a separate photo, it is enough to ask the system to generate the corresponding code, which can be copied to the desired page. To organize links, it is possible to use a shortened URL using Base58 encoding ^[10] .

Additional Services

Additional services allow users to share photos and tags on them. Hanging up labels on your photos can make them easier to find. For photos, a list of other objects with similar labels is displayed. This feedback leads to communication between users through metadata. Flickr system supports the possibility of correspondence between users. However, these correspondence relationships do not have a noticeable effect on the formation of the overall picture or label map used by the entire community. Flickr service allows you to get a map of keywords that are most often used in the classification of photographs. Flickr system users can form interest groups with the possibility of conducting thematic discussions, invite other users and their photos to the group, and consider the location of group photos on the map.

Licensing

In order to comply with copyright, the service prohibits the placement of other people's works, providing users with the opportunity to protect their work with proprietary and free licenses (including using Creative Commons licenses ) ^[11] .

Cartographic Sources

In addition to using commercial map data, Flickr currently uses OpenStreetMap maps in various cities. It started with Beijing ahead of the 2008 Olympics . As of October 2008, these cards are used in Baghdad , Beijing , Kabul , Sydney and Tokyo ^{[12] [13] [14]} . OpenStreetMap data is collected by volunteers and is available under the ODbL license.

As part of the network of teachers' community, supported in 2005 by the Intel ® Learning for the Future program, a collection of digital photographs representing the cities of Russia was collected on the Flickr.com server: St. Petersburg , Nizhny Novgorod , Saratov , Irkutsk , Novosibirsk , Yekaterinburg , Pskov , Voronezh . The collection is replenished by teachers and students. When adding new photos, the project participants add a description and keywords to it - tags by which the photo can be found in the future. In the event that the exact GPS coordinates are defined for the place where the photo was taken, they are also added as marks. The use of such tags and the GeoBloggers network service allows you to combine stories and photos posted in the collection by project participants with the Google Maps digital map service and get the image of the point at which the photo was taken on the map. Each digital photograph receives not only temporal, but also spatial significance. Users who tagged their photos with geotagged, geo: lat = coordinate, geo: long = coordinate, receive from the geobloggers service a map on which these photos are placed. In a simplified record, accepted for entering data as shortcuts in the Flickr system, the coordinates are written as geo: lat = 56.1939 and geo: long = 43.5922.

Since September 2015, photo hosting has been blocked in Kazakhstan ^[15] .

On September 9, 2015, photo hosting was temporarily blocked on the territory of the Russian Federation due to the fact that www.flickr.com and the yahoo.screen registry website was blocked due to the video “Islamic State Release Propaganda Film Entitled Flames of War” IP addresses Access to photo hosting was opened after yahoo deleted a page with prohibited content at the request of Roskomnadzor ^[16] .

Since December 7, 2015 it has been blocked in Russia ^[17] due to the fact that www.flickr.com and the sports.yahoo.com website entered in the register of blocked sites have common IP addresses (188.125.93.38, 188.125.93.39). These sites were unblocked on 1/16/2016 ^[17]

• 500px
• Panoramio
• Photobucket
• Yandex.Photos

• Flickr.com
• Flickr blog
• Group for Russian-speaking users Flickr
•   Flickr Google Maps KMZ service photo layer ( KMZ tag file for Google Earth )