Flickr

I should really have given this post a generic title about sharing images but I chose flickr as it has become so popular and while its not reached the stage of becoming a verb like Google it is arguably the best known of the many online photo management and sharing tools.

Flickr is also the web site that many archives and also museums have chosen to host their images on. It offers unlimited uploads and collections with its pro account for £13/$25 a year and photographs can be licensed under the creative commons to provide some copyright management when required.


The benefit of having your photographic collection hosted on flickr is that it can allow users to participate in the descriptive process by adding comments to individual photos. This allows archivists to obtain detailed and informed descriptions of their collections that they themselves might not not have the knowledge or time to produce.

Whether your archive can make use of flickr depends on your collections and copyright issues. Some examples of archives using flickr are:

• AASU Armstrong University Archives
• Douglas County History Research Centre
• National Archives of Australia
• University of Delaware
• National Library of New Zealand

It can also be used to collect images, as these examples show:

• Oxford University - Great War Archive
• Veterans of the American Civil War
• London at war