Today, we’re pleased to announce two important updates that deepen Flickr’s commitment to our members and to the worldwide photography community.

All public Creative Commons works on Flickr are now protected from deletion.

Creative Commons licenses have been an important part of Flickr since we introduced them on our platform in 2004. We’ve made it simple for Flickr members to license any photos in their account under any of the Creative Commons licenses and designations, which has resulted in Flickr being the largest single repository of freely licensed material anywhere in the world. We now host more than 500 million public CC-licensed works, with many more uploaded every day.

When we recently announced updates to Flickr Free accounts, we stated that freely licensed public photos (Creative Commons, public domain, U.S. government works, etc.) as of November 1, 2018 in excess of the free account limit would not be deleted. We wanted to make sure we didn’t disrupt the hundreds of millions of stories across the global internet that link to freely licensed Flickr images. We know the cost of storing and serving these images is vastly outweighed by the value they represent to the world.

In this spirit, today we’re going further and now protecting all public, freely licensed images on Flickr, regardless of the date they were uploaded. We want to make sure we preserve these works and further the value of the licenses for our community and for anyone who might benefit from them.

In conjunction with this announcement, we’ve disabled bulk license change tools in the Settings, the Camera Roll, and the Organizr for Flickr Free accounts. We’ve done this to prevent community members from flipping all their images to a new license without first understanding the significant implications of the various free licenses we support. Any member (Free or Pro) can still change the license of any of their photos on the photo page.

We’ve supported Creative Commons for as long as we’ve been around and we’re thrilled to do so for newly-uploaded content as well.

“In memoriam” accounts for deceased members.

Since we announced changes to Flickr’s Free and Pro accounts on November 1, we’ve heard from members who are concerned about what will happen to accounts owned by deceased members, and what will happen to their own accounts when they die. We’re photography lovers here at Flickr, too, and we love the idea of photographers’ legacies living on in memoriam—that’s why we’re pleased to announce today that we’re offering “in memoriam” accounts to existing Flickr members who have passed away.

In memoriam accounts will preserve all public content in a deceased member’s account, even if their Pro subscription lapses. The account’s username will be updated to reflect the “in memoriam” status and login for the account be locked, preventing anyone from signing in.

We’d love your help to identify any existing accounts that deserve in memoriam status so we can make sure their contributions to the community are preserved. To nominate an account, please read this article in the Flickr Help Center. If our Support Heroes can verify the required details, we will preserve the account in memoriam.