Meet our sixth story contributor, James Mcmanus (a.k.a. james m) is from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. For him, the best thing to come out of being a Flickr member are all the fantastic friends he’s made through the Sydney Photobloggers group from their many outings, trips away (sometimes to visit the folks from the  Melbourne Silver Mine group) or spending Christmas with each other. Needless to say, he has many good memories from the last 8 years on Flickr.

"There are plenty of members out there who’s work I have been following for a long time and would love to meet someday for a beer then head out for the day photographing with them. Some I have already had the pleasure meeting but on the top of my list is notraces and his wife Supercapacity. Come May this year I am off to Canada and the U.S. for long overdue holiday and in June will get a chance to spend some time with both and maybe even meet a few others on the list while I am over there as well."

James’ first 2 favorites are from Bob and Ali and the remaining 6 are from other people he would like to meet up with this May.

Thank you James for sharing your story! We will be back shortly with our next episode.

Photos from james m, notraces, Supercapacity, PHOTOMO, joe holmes, Mute*, anniebee, diyosa, and sneakrluv14.

The fifth member who we spoke to about his experiences during his eight years on Flickr is Jared Tarbell (a.k.a. jared), from Albuquerque. While he doesn’t quite remember how he first found himself on Flickr’s chat rooms back in 2004, one thing he still remembers is that it was fun: interacting with strangers through images and text. He joined a transhumanism group. He started ťŗăΰęļïňŋġ ψϊţħǿμţ πőōνįńģ. He uploaded photos of his dog, himself, and some trees. He was thinking about design and his own growing website project, Etsy.com.

"If the Internet was rock and roll, Flickr would most definitely be the Beatles. It changed everything."

"Eight years later and Flickr is still the only website I check on a daily basis", Jared says. "I enjoy looking at photographs from my friends, telling their stories one thousand words at a time. I explore the world through a million lenses. My own camera contributes a small part to the expedition. Sure, maybe I take too many photographs of rocks or clouds, but I am also telling my own story of life on Earth."

"I am honored to be included in Flickr’s eight year anniversary. I’m going to go grab my camera now and hope for another eight."

And with that, here are Jared’s eight favorite photos:

"What planet are we on again?"

"One great space science photograph and all my troubles seem to fade away. Don’t forget that these photographs can be viewed at over 5000 pixels wide!"

"This computational artifact unfolds into our reality with beauty and mystery."

"The best kind of photograph."

"Holger Lippmann is one of my favorite people to follow on Flickr. He is continually updating with new algorithmically generated work. I’m happy Flickr decided to allow images generated from sources other than a camera."

"I can solve any problem looking at this photograph. Thank you YoungDoo."

"I don’t know Monique, but I feel like I do. She takes amazing photographs from around the world, with particular interest in small common multiples. I love small common multiples, forever."

"I love these two people (both sides of the lens) and all the Flickr team."

Thank you Jared for sharing your story! Please stay tuned for our next episode.

Photos from jared, Alexander Semenov, NASA Goddard Photo and Video, Syntopia, 0olong, HolgerLippmann (work in process), youngdoo, M00k, and Stewart.

The fourth member we would like to introduce today is Chris Heathcote (a.k.a. antimega), from London. For him Flickr really is the Eyes of the World, as it lets him keep up with what lots of friends are doing, as well as find new people that are doing interesting things.

Whilst Flickr is often thought to be for ‘photographers’, what Chris enjoys most are the slices of life it allows you to share, in particular what you’re interested in, and what means something to you. "Flickr was the first website to really push sharing in public – ‘why would someone want to see a photo of your lunch?’ – but it’s proved that the random, the banal, the matter-of-fact really does keep up a constant communication with hundreds of people."

To illustrate, Chris shows us his most popular food photo (out of around 5000) – a brilliant dessert he had at the San Francisco restaurant Citizen Cake (now sadly closed, but our eyes can still feast on this beauty).

Here are the eight favorite photos Chris’ wants to share with us:

"I have many friends that go to places where I haven’t been, and through Flickr I get to experience them too. I’d have loved to go to the Shanghai Expo a few years ago, but thankfully people like Dan have taken great pictures."

"Timo‘s photos are always beautiful, but his explorations of rain and focus are particularly poignant."

"Paul‘s got a great eye for the city, and the shapes and textures therein."

"I think Flickr has really sparked a revival in many kinds of traditional photography – from pinholes to plate film. Heather‘s solargraphy shows what’s possible with just a film canister and a piece of film – a stunning shot that took 6 months to make."

"The Hello Little Fella group explores pareidolia – the experience of seeing faces in things. Matt‘s photo is one of my favourites – a slightly poorly little fella having his temperature taken."

"Glen catalogues many of the food disasters that prevailed in 60s and 70s cookbooks. Constantly amusing, but builds into a great resource as more and more of the food from recent history gets catalogued."

"Likewise, Steve is building a great collection of British Rail ephemera (as well as documenting 50s-80s architecture)."

"I think the Flickr Commons is one of the greatest achievements of Flickr: getting institutions to publish their archive online – not only letting everyone have instant access, but it also makes them easy to find, and even lets you use and reference the images too. Institutions have also found it useful for crowdsourcing tagging and filing, plus sometimes more information comes out through comments and notes than would have been found if the image was just filed in a physical archive."

Thank you Chris for telling us your story! Please stay tuned for our next episode.

Photos from foe, antimega, cityofsound, Ti.mo, blech​, heather, moleitau, glen.h, smallritual and The National Archives UK.

Our third story was told us by, Ranjit Bhatnagar (a.k.a. ranjit), from Brooklyn, New York. He tells us that he has met some great friends through Flickr, and even had the chance to go travelling with them to amazing places. Flickr is also the place where his pet dog gets all the international adoration it deserves. Lastly, Ranjit is a great fan of Video on Flickr: "I don’t know much about video, but I am learning, and the 90 second limit to Video on Flickr keeps me (and everyone else) from getting too long and boring."

One other very positive experience Ranjit had with Flickr is that it got him a big show in a major NYC subway station a few years back ( read more about it here). He also used Flickr to coordinate his latest show with the curator at the Brooklyn Public Library. And those nice 90-second-or-less videos are perfect for documenting his sound/art projects.

Here are Ranjit’s eight Flickr faves:

"LOOK AT THOSE TEETH!!!"

"I have no idea how to take pictures of moving people, but spatialk really does!"

"Oops, there’s another picture of my dog."

"The slight overexposure makes this especially comforting for some reason."

"diastema made all these crazy tiny scenes that were part of the inspiration for the play with your food group."

"horticultural_art does amazing things with plant bits and scanners."

"Just amazing."

"Thin colored stripes are kind of hypnotic."

Thank you Ranjit for sharing your story with us! The next episode will be coming up in a bit.

Photos from SpatialK, ranjit, La Mariposa, helveticaneue, diastema, horticultural art, Fifi LePew, and * tathei *.

Meet our second story contributor, Bryan Boyer (a.k.a. bryanboyer), who spends most of his time in Helsinki. For Bryan, contacts and exploring new ideas are what matters most on Flickr. Connections to new friends, new ideas, new communities, new foods and new places.

Bryan tells us that the best thing about Flickr has always been the high quality photography paired with member’s willingness to not only upload, but also generously share details behind the photographs by tagging, adding descriptions and responding to comments.

"I started using the site because it was the best place online to share images and learn from others.
Eight years on and this still holds true."

As a student and later as a practicing designer, Flickr provided Bryan with a creative community to explore ideas. He recognizes the inspiration that comes from the steady stream of fresh uploads to the site, but for him, the most meaningful aspect of the site is when there’s a conversation. In particular, the design community seems to especially love the notes feature. Few other sites enable a visual conversation so effectively and with such precision.

Here are Bryan’s eight favorites:

"I like this photo because it reminds me of a nice time years ago, but makes an unexpected connection to the present day. This was taken by my friend Gregory while we were visiting the Villa Mairea, a house by the famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. I had always loved the project and it was a joy to see in person, at the peak of summer, when the forest was exploding with life. Little did I know that years later I would find myself living in Finland."

"One of the things I love about the community of architects that I am friends with on Flickr is that I occasionally get a glimpse into the secret life of icons, like the Farnsworth House pictured here, as they are really lived in. Not just the glossy, perfect pictures that you see on postcards and in history books."

"Existing architectural icons are one thing, but what I enjoy even more is using Flickr as a way to see the next round of interesting projects from architects around the world. This photo by the talented Belgian architects Ony One is a favorite because it shows the messy side of making buildings. Sometimes it involves crawling head first into unexpected places. After following Ony One’s work for about six years on Flickr we finally met up when I was in Brussels on business last year."

"As a graduate student I felt a strong connection to other students in schools near and far who were also posting their work online. This sketch by a good friend of mine is particularly meaningful because it marks an inflection point in Samba.‘s design work. From this point on things were different. Maybe the 16 favorites helped encourage Samba. to go off the deep end into fantastical architecture?"

"Recently Samba. and I had the pleasure to meet Sevensixfive in person. We had both followed Sevensixfive’s work since he was in graduate school at the same time as us. This is the proof… posted to Flickr, of course!"

"Besides this community of nerdy architects, the other thing I use Flickr for is to keep up with the lives of my friends who live far and wide. This self portrait of Spenceke is one of my favorites because she’s wearing an Optimus Prime helmet. And cooking. Protect humanity and cook dinner? Those Autobots sure do know how to be nice."

"Ivo, the darling son of close friends Rena and Derek, always makes me laugh. Moments of simple humor like this are one small way I enjoy keeping pace with the lives of my friends in other cities, on other continents."

"I don’t know how he does it, but Ti.mo can take a picture of two people opening the door and stuff it with anticipation and meaning. While I particularly like this image of Ti.mo’s, you could just as easily select one of the other 31,000 (!) in his photostream and you are equally likely to find a slice of the mundane suspended in a precise, crisp light."

Thank you Bryan for sharing your story with us! The next episode will be coming up in a bit.

Photos from Katie Spence, gac, park.will, Wannes Deprez / Ony One, samba., reebob, and Ti.mo.

Meet our first story contributor, Matt Haughey (a.k.a. mathowie), from Portland, who tells us that Flickr has greatly enriched his life in all sorts of ways since he signed up on the day the site launched. Matt says that Flickr has definitely made him a better photographer by letting him easily find and follow photographers whose work he admires. What he especially likes is that they’ll often answer technical questions and give details on how they got the shot.

When his wife became pregnant in 2004, they announced it to friends via a friends/family only Flickr photo of the ultrasound, when online photo sharing was still a relatively new concept.

Months later Matt kept his friends, family, and the entire Internet up to date on the birth by posting a photo taken with his mobile phone to Flickr every few hours, and to this day Matt loves getting comments and favorites from friends on every new photo of his family.

Matt reveals that there are two pages that he hits every day, Photos From My Contacts and then Recent Activity. His favorite Flickr feature by far is the “Recent Activity” page, as it lets him know when people comment on old uploads, favorite his photographs and gives him insights into what people like about his photos. Matt even mimicked this type of interaction for his own MetaFilter community since he liked it so much.

"Some of my photos have gotten way more views than I ever thought possible."

One of them is this photo that was taken in 2005 when Matt moved into a new house. A light fixture perplexed him, and friends helped him figure out how to change the light bulb. Obviously, many other people were puzzled as well, as seven years later, Matt still gets comments every couple of weeks from people thanking him for posting it because they have the same light fixture and were stumped in the same way he was.

"I’m a serious user of favorites on Flickr, and I use them to mark photos I love, photos I’m amazed by, photos I find funny, and things I want to save for later. I’ve racked up over 3,200 favorites over the past eight years and when I dove into them looking for my most favorite favorites, I was amazed to find most of the impressive photos came from close friends that aren’t professional photographers per se."

Matt says he typically favorites any random person’s amazing shot he likes. He has hundreds of faves that he found on Explore, but going through his favorites for this article, he was surprised to find that many of the amazing shots were done by close personal friends.

Thank you Matt for sharing your story with us! We will be back with the next story soon.

Photos from mathowie, Matt Biddulph, Steve1949, KDUNK, Nelson Minar, rion, veen, Alaina B., and G. J. Charlet III.

“Yay! The gates are open and welcome Flickr testers. We are now in what is considered our preview release 1 of public beta. We’ll be fixing bugs, monitoring scaling issues on the back end, and adding a few features before going into preview release 2. Then we’ll go into preview release 3 and then when that’s good to go the beta period will be officially over.”

This was the entry in the Flickr changelog on February 10^th, 2004, the day when Flickr was released to the public at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference.

Eight years later to the day, Flickr has grown to be the best photo sharing community with millions of members and billions of photos from all around the world. We are excited to commemorate Flickr’s 8^th birthday with all of you!

As much as we don’t want to get all ‘Oscar acceptance speech’ on you… we also want to thank YOU, because Flickr wouldn’t be possible without your amazing photography, your generosity in sharing your lives with us and your zest for being part of this awesome community. We’re quite smitten with you guys.

To celebrate the occasion, we are going to feature 8 members who have joined Flickr in February 2004 and have been around since the beginning.

Stay tuned, we will start with the first episode of “8 Years, 8 Members, 8 Stories” shortly…

Photo from squirrelmonkey

Back in early 2008, some clever folks at the U.S. Library of Congress and Flickr collaborated to create a pilot project with two key goals: To increase exposure to the hidden treasures held in the world’s public photography archives, and to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

To achieve these goals, a special rights statement — ‘No known copyright restrictions’ — was created to provide a copyright framework allowing institutions to add their photos to Flickr and define how the public could use their work through their own rights statement.

That project became known as The Commons on Flickr.

The Commons started with 1,500 photos from a single institution and has grown steadily to 56 institutions in 12 countries exhibiting over 200,000 photos. And over the last four years we have seen a ton of engagement from the Flickr community with over 130,000 comments and nearly 7 million favorites on these images.

What we’ve learnt since launch

Right from the start, it was clear that these rich archives had the power to bring people together to make light work of viewing and interpreting photographs. It was also clear that institutions sharing their interesting photography archives combined with a passionate community were the right ingredients to make something very special happen, bringing together personal stories and collective wisdom.

Using the collaborative tools on Flickr, such as comments, tags and notes has helped institutions and members communicate and contribute details around the archival photography.

“We loved how viewers took advantage of Flickr’s visually-oriented note tool to point out particular details of the photographs, and we marveled at the ways in which commenters offered connections to related images and resources that helped explain the pictures.”- Barbara Orbach Natanson from the Library of Congress.

There have been instances where Flickr members contributed context and story-telling around a photo which was then verified by the institutions and even added to the official records of that photo.

From The Library of Congress’s set Mystery Pictures – Solved! members were able to identify the mystery location of the photo and provide modern-day photos of that very location.

With examples from many other institutions also:

Then by National Gallery of Scotland, now by Vo0Ds:

Then by Biblioteque Toulouse, now by janberckmans:

Then by the New York Public Library, now by tarawo,

 
It’s also heart-warming to browse the Library of Congress’ set Great Comments! THANK YOU!

“Flickr members have found family members through the photographs, they’ve helped commemorate individuals whose stories aren’t well known but deserve to be remembered, they’ve solved mysteries, and they’ve helped us all appreciate the technology and art of photography.”- Barbara Orbach Natanson from the Library of Congress.

Members were also able to help identify these survivors of the Titanic.

The photo with the given title “Louis & Lola ?– TITANIC survivors (LOC)” was revealed to be actually orphans of the Titanic disaster, French brothers Michel (age 4) and Edmond Navratil (age 2) with the nicknames Lolo and Mamon.

Family relatives have been identified within photographs in The Commons:

The power of photography to bring people together

We’ve been delighted to see how the power of photography brings people together, which we’ve seen most clearly with groups such as the Flickr Commons group, the community-created site indicommons, offline community meet ups and the creative uses of Commons photos by members utilizing the No Known Copyright framework.

Many thanks to the team at the Library of Congress and George Oates who founded The Commons on Flickr, all of the additional 55 Commons institutions that have joined over the course of four years, and last but not least to you, the Flickr community, who have made The Commons what it is today and never cease to amaze us with your creativity and passion for photography. Whee!

 
Photos from State Library of New South Wales collection, Nationaal Archief, National Library of Ireland on The Commons, George Eastman House, Smithsonian Institution, San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives, NASA on The Commons, The U.S. National Archives, Brooklyn Museum, The Library of Congress, cercamon, National Galleries of Scotland Commons, Vo0Ds, Bibliothèque de Toulouse, janberckmans, New York Public Library, tarawo, Swedish National Heritage Board, and pennylrichardsca.

Come and meet other Flickr members at two events on the East Coast later this month. Swing on by to meet Flickr staff in New York and Philadelphia to talk about gear, take photos, walk with us through the city and chat about the site. Here are our (new) meetup pages, with signup information:
 

New York, February 18^th – More info & RSVP

Philadelphia, February 19^th – More info & RSVP

In other news: Starting today, we’re switching to Meetup.com as our main site for global community events. Feel free to start and organize your own, or join in with existing ones in your neighborhood. Here’s our shiny, new Flickr page on Meetup. We hope to see you in New York or Philadelphia!

Photos from a.commonplace.life, jodi*mckee and damiec.

iamaustin published the photos from this lovely project in his photostream.