Flickr.com

Flickr, photo-sharing Web site owned by SmugMug and headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Flickr is an ad-supported service, free to the general public, that allows users to upload digital photographs from their own computers and share them online with either private groups or the world at large. In the early 2000s it won a fast-growing contingent of enthusiasts on the strength of its many social-networking features, most significantly the ability for users to discuss photographs online.

The service began as a peripheral feature in an online electronic game being developed by the Canadian software company Ludicorp. Company founders (and spouses) Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake ultimately abandoned the game and debuted Flickr by itself in 2004. Its key early innovation was the use of “free tagging,” a feature that enabled users to associate metadata tags—searchable keywords—of their own devising with any photographs they viewed, thus creating a large network of associations and allowing users around the world to discover each other’s work. By developing an unregulated but expansive “folksonomy,” Flickr spared itself the prohibitive cost of centrally creating links and groupings.

In March 2005 Flickr was purchased by the Internet giant Yahoo! and relocated to California. Under the Yahoo! banner, Flickr became a dominant photo-sharing service, increasing its roster of registered users from 250,000 to more than 2,000,000 in less than a year. The site continued rolling out new features, including copyright management, an interactive map of photographed locations, and customizable print products. In June 2008 Butterfield and Fake left Yahoo!, and Flickr continued to expand. In July 2008 Getty Images, one of the world’s largest photographic agencies, announced a plan to begin inviting selected Flickr members to participate in one of its commercial photo groups. Flickr was supplanted as the dominant photo-sharing service by social media companies such as Facebook and Instagram, and it also faced competition from other services that offered inexpensive online data storage. In 2017 the American telecommunications company Verizon Communications acquired Yahoo! and reorganized it into a subsidiary, Oath, and the next year SmugMug acquired Flickr from Oath.