Photos from æ, ~ geisha ~, Tracing Tray, and gilmae.

The London School of Economics and Political Science joins The Commons on Flickr as our 30th partner! Here’s a little about them in their own words,

The London School of Economics and Political Science was founded in 1895; The decision to found the School was made at a breakfast party between four Fabians: Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Wallas, and George Bernard Shaw on 4 August 1894. Over the last few years we have noticed an increasing interest in our photographic collections relating to the LSE. The photographs, however, are spread across different archive collections and have only been possible to view in hard copy in our reading room. In response to this, the project, LSE: a History of Pictures was set up to digitise at least 1000 images for open access on Flickr, which has been funded by the LSE Annual Fund. – LSE

They begin their Commons journey with 20 sets, spanning the life of the school from the 1890s onward and offering a snapshot of student and academic life in London. A few sets to get you started are….

British Political Posters, c1905-c1910 – Period editorial posters depicting both economic and political concerns of the day.

LSE Founders and Early Days 1895-1920s – Meet the four founders of LSE, Charlotte and George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, from a 1932 trip to Russia.

Formal LSE Staff Portraits – including Karl Popper, Beatrice Webb and H.G. Wells.

Or just check out student life at LSE in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s!

My favourite time of year. What’s better than a dog in a costume? How about two, with one riding the other? Check out the photo bottom right for the result.

Photos from {SNS Photography}, EllenJo, serena.photography, jeffdillonphotography, nutmegknitter, and minicoopergirl06. Check out more fabulousness in the Dogs in Costumes group pool.

The spice must flow.

Photos by matteo_dudek, Matthieu :: giik.net/blog, GavinBell, dachalan, Greg Robbins, turbotoddi and Jungle_Boy.

See more in the Minimal Black&White group

Photos by maxhomand, Pic@, Arkadius Zagrabski, josh leahy & TWRebelxt

8:15 AM PDT Ok, things should be smoothed out again. You may see some discrepancy in stats data on photopages. We took extra time getting our stats databases up and running; which is why you had access to the site, but the stats view was missing. Doing this ensures that we don’t overwhelm systems when we come back up. To be sure, none of your Flickr content was lost, but we apologize that some of the counts will be wrong.

7:33 AM PDT Hello- Your stats should be back up for you now; we had that disabled for a short while. To let you know, there was a power issue in a datacenter that caused an outage, and apologize for that. Rest assured, no data was lost (however some stats are not correct, see the update above). Our operations engineers are all working to make sure all systems are clear. Again, thanks a lot for your patience, and you can visit out help topic for any feedback or questions.

6:48 PDT We’re almost there. A lot of you should already be seeing improvement, meaning that you can reach us without issues again. Unfortunately, we had to disable the display of stats so they are not available at the current time. We will keep you posted. We have opened a thread for you on the help forum.

6:00 PDT We are still working on bringing the site back online. Just in case you are wondering: All photos you might have posted on your blog or elsewere should still be serving without problems. Our engineers are working as hard a possible to bring Flickr back to you. Thanks for your patience.

5:30 PDT We are very sorry for the inconvenience, but right now Flickr is a bit unhappy and the site is down. The great guys from FlickrOps are already investigating what’s going on, so please bear with us. We will keep you posted right here with any updates.

We’ve launched People in Photos, a new feature that will help put a face to the Flickrverse and enable you to highlight members that you’ve photographed in a whole new way. People in Photos lets you add a member to a photo, find photos of people you know, and manage which photos you’re in. Huzzah!

To add someone to a photo, you can either type in the member’s name, much like you’d add a tag, or you can draw a face boundary on the photo, as with a note. People in Photos has been wired into your your Recent Activity, so you’ll always be up to date with who’s added you to a photo or added other members to your photos.

But maybe you’re thinking, “Eep — me in a photo?” Don’t fret. We’ve spent a lot of time weaving together a variety of preferences that will ensure you’re only featured on Flickr in a way that you’re comfortable with.

You can set your preferences for who can add you to photos and who can add people to photos you’ve shared. You can even determine on a photo-by-photo basis if you’d like to be featured — after all, everyone has a bad hair day now and then. If you do remove yourself from a photo, only you will be able to add yourself back in. If you decide that People in Photos isn’t your thing, you can remove yourself entirely.

We also extend that same level of personal control to people who aren’t on Flickr. If you wish to add someone to a photo who’s not yet a member, that person needs to give their approval to be added.

Profile updates

Finally, you’ll see that your member profile is sporting a swanky new look. In addition to featuring a few of your recent favourites, if you’ve been featured via People in Photos, you’ll see thumbnails of those pictures too.

These FAQs will get you started — What is People in Photos?, How do I add a person to a photo?, Who can add me to a photo?, How can I remove myself from a photo? and, How will I know when I’m added to a photo? The complete People in Photos FAQs are available here.

If you’ve feedback about People in Photos, or encounter bugs, please head over to our Help Forum.

Otherwise, Flickr Central wants to know — What did you do while Flickr was down?

Photos from meg price, ardenstreet, and angie mckaig photography. View more in this “roll over” cluster.

14:20 PM PDT: To recap from our Forum post, we deployed a change which introduced a bug that was not caught previously. Our WWW servers became overwhelmed, and this affected the API as well. As previously mentioned, if you posted one of your photos in your blog, those were working as our image servers were not affected, but if you had an application in use that was using the Flickr API, it would not have been available. We apologize for the outage; as always, we hate it as you do.

11:26 AM PDT: We’ve got WWWs serving up again, and we also have an official Help Forum topic here. We’re still working on lingering issues, but things are on the mend.

10:50 AM PDT: Hey, we wanted to make sure you all knew, if you embedded photos from a photopage on Flickr, we are still serving them. So, if they are posted to your blog, your photos will still be showing there. What we are doing now is working on getting all our WWW servers back on for everyone; this includes bringing the API back up, which has been affected as well. Sorry for the downtime to everyone, we hate it as much as you!

10:05 AM PDT: We’re still here working on getting things up and serving to you, shouldn’t be too much longer!

9:18 AM, PDT: Hello! All hands are on deck over here and we’re still working on getting things back up for everyone. Apologies for the disruption!

8:51 AM, PDT: Ahoy everyone! Flickr is experiencing problems at the present time, and our engineers are all in the main engine room, working on resolving the issue. Please hang tight, and we’ll have things back for you as soon as possible. If we need to, we’ll post an update for you here.

Photo by whatnot.

The Flickr Blog has really been lit up the past week, with Diwali, and Asuka Lighting Festival. Now, as suggested in Flickr Central by phoenixesrose, we present you with something from the 2009 Berlin Festival of Lights which is going on through 25 October.

Photos by d3us, | p | a | t | p | i | x |, chris grabert, tomkpunkt, mr172, Ole Begemann and ksfoto. To enjoy more, there are some lovely pools to look at, or you can try a search or two.