One of the best things about Flickr is that our membership is made up of people from so many places and diverse backgrounds. It’s important to us that everyone feel comfortable, despite vastly different cultural and personal comfort levels. What I like, you might not, and it’s up to the entire community to make this work. So, we’ve rolled out content filtering which allows you to flag your images as you upload and also set your viewing preferences for what you’d like to see (or not).

There’s a complete FAQ covering all the details, but here are the important highlights:

• Uploading: The new system enables you to categorize everything you upload by Safety Level (safe, moderate, restricted) and Content Type (photo, art/illustration/cgi, screenshot). So as an example, you can set a default preference to tell Flickr you generally upload safe screenshots.
• Searching and Viewing: The reason you need to place your content into the categories above is so that content filters can be applied later on, both in search and in your general browsing around. There is a new search preference available to you, where you can choose what content you’d normally like to have show up in searches (e.g. photos and screenshots), and a safety level you’re comfortable with.
• Your Account: You can now set up default categories for your uploads and set your SafeSearch preference. As a bonus, you can also hide your photostream from public searches on Flickr (and from any 3rd party sites that access Flickr via our open API)
• "Flag This Photo": The "This may be offensive" link has expanded to a widget where you can change the categories associated with individual images, and we’ve updated the Organizr so you can edit stuff there too (both individual photos and in batches)
• We’ve heard your feedback: The status of your account is now noted on Your Account page.

As with any change to a living system, there’s bound to be turbulence and we apologize in advance for any errors. We have been running parallel review of both new and old accounts for a few months, but there is a small backlog of older accounts that may be miscategorized. If you feel that your Flickr account falls into this bucket, don’t panic! You can request a review of either a photo or your whole account using new options in the Help by Email form.

We’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect content filters and the continuing role & responsibility each member has in being a good Flickr citizen. Please take a moment to review them at your earliest convenience.

As always, we’ll be happy to answer any questions and hear feedback that you may have regarding this new feature in this Official Help Topic.

Photo from warrenguy.