Come to Our Party: The 7th Birthday of the Flickr Commons

The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division.

You’re invited to play a virtual game that offers a fun way to explore the remarkable Flickr Commons.  A new year of this special collaboration among close to 100 archives, libraries, and museums begins on January 16th. So brace yourself for variety as you explore the 4 million photographs and book illustrations with no known copyright restrictions now offered through the Flickr Commons.

If you don’t have a Flickr account, you won’t be able to leave tags or comments within Flickr but please enjoy browsing the diversity of collections in the Commons, and leave comments on this blog post about what you find. Or take a look at the images from the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog and let us know in the comments which collections with no known copyright restrictions you’d like to see uploaded to Flickr this year (you can even include “no known restrictions” in your search!).

If you do have a Flickr account:

• Pin a Tag on the Best Photos – Search for a favorite subject at flickr.com/commons. Select your favorites and add this tag: CommonsBest
  Example: I tried “hats”: https://www.flickr.com/search/?w=commons&q=hats
• Lucky 7 —  Look up a number and favorite the photos that immediately catch your attention. I enjoy this game because the random results reveal pictures I’d never have thought to ask for.
  Example: Searching “seven” offers a nice variety: https://www.flickr.com/search/?w=8623220@N02&q=seven)
•  Hometown – Now and Then – Search within the Library of Congress photostream for your hometown or a place you’ve visited. Then post one of your own photos in a comment in Flickr to show how the place looks today.
•  Make a Gallery –You can select up to 50 images for a Flickr gallery.  Can you put together a gallery on a subject for which 50 different Commons accounts have posted related images?

It’s been a great seven years. We’ve uploaded over 22,700 images organized into 34 albums and enhanced almost  7,000 records in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalog based on information provided by Flickr community members. Here’s a snapshot of our account stats according to Flickr as of December 31, 2014:

• 178,000,000+ total views
• 333,000+ favorites
• 60,755+ followers
• 59,700+ comments

We appreciate all the comments and tags that the Flickr community has contributed to make nearly 7,000 photos in our collections so much easier to find and understand.

Learn More:

• Explore the Library’s collections on Flickr
• Read about the Flickr Commons experience from a previous anniversary
• Sample our “thank you” Flickr album to see the many ways in which comments and notes have enriched the descriptions and our understanding of the power of pictures!