A closer look at Flickr’s curated Wall Art collections

As many of you know, last week we announced that we are now offering more than 50 million photos to print as part of Flickr Wall Art. These include curated collections from our new Flickr Marketplace in various popular categories–such as travel, abstract, landscapes, food, and animals–as well as beautiful images from Flickr’s Creative Commonns collection.

In response to questions and feedback from Flickr community members, we wanted to provide you with some more information about this new product.

Wall Art screen shot copy

First, why are we doing this?

We see Flickr Wall Art as an added value to our members and like everything we do at Flickr, we are building this service for our amazing community. Now you can browse these beautiful collections and print not just your own photostream, but over 50 million images, to hang in your home, office, or dorm room, on high quality canvas and photo mounts.

We believe it’s possible to build a healthy and profitable marketplace for photography with the ownership of intellectual property as a core tenet of that marketplace. At Flickr, we give you many choices for how you upload your photos and what license you choose. This allows you to be in control of the rights you grant to your work.

What are these rights?

Flickr account settings allow our members an incredible amount of flexibility. You can upload your photos as private (or friends, family, or friends and family) or public. You can also choose to grant rights for the distribution and commercial use of your work. The default license on Flickr is All Rights Reserved, the standard copyright and the most restrictive license, but we offer six variations of Creative Commons licenses, including non-commercial and commercial options.

Creative Commons has been a fundamental part of our ecosystem since 2004. With more than 300 million images marked Creative Commons, Flickr is the largest repository of freely licensed images in the world. Members who license under Creative Commons commercial licenses (CC-BY and CC-BY-SA) are embracing these free licenses and encouraging use of their photos, whether commercially or otherwise.

What if I want to change my photo settings?

You can change your account settings at any time! You can change the license type at the photo level, on a batch of photos, and at the account level. If you still want to license your work freely as part of Creative Commons, but don’t want anyone, including Flickr, to use your work commercially, you can select one of the non-commercial licenses (such as CC-BY-NC) or All Rights Reserved, and your images won’t be eligible for printing by anyone but you.

What is the Flickr Marketplace?

The Flickr Marketplace allows us to work directly with our creative community to provide licensing and monetization opportunities. With Wall Art, Flickr’s licensed artists will receive 51% of the net sales of their work. We see this as an exciting step as we continue to meticulously explore and identify the right opportunities for our licensed photographers. Like everything we do at Flickr, we want our community to receive the best tools, education, and rights protection.

For now, the program is by invitation only. Currently, you can sign up here if you’re interested in receiving updates on the licensing program. If your images are a good fit for the marketplace, the curation team will reach out. Find more information on the Flickr Marketplace by checking out our FAQ.

For more…

To print Wall Art, get started at our new landing page and feel free to leave us feedback at Flickr Ideas. We really appreciate the questions and comments you share with us for improving Flickr and our community.

Bernardo Hernandez
Vice President, Flickr