Dear Flickr friends,

2019 was a spectacularly busy year for Flickr. We exited Yahoo and migrated all our systems—and all your photographs—to new, more reliable infrastructure. SmugMug’s investment in Flickr has allowed us to grow from a tiny team to a small one, with wonderful new Support Heroes and engineers helping us improve the reliability of Flickr and deliver on the promises we made a year ago:

• Move off Yahoo login: Delivered! You can now use any email address you prefer to log in to Flickr.
• Premier support: Delivered! We hope you never need help with your Flickr account, but more than 9/10 of those who do file a support ticket are delighted with the help they receive. Pro members always get priority responses, usually in far less than a day.
• More partner discounts: Delivered! Check your account for Pro Perks. We were particularly excited to announce a new partnership with Pixsy to help Flickr photographers find and fight image theft so they can feel safe and secure sharing their work on Flickr.
• Increased exposure for Pros: Delivered, with caveats: Explore is well over 60% Pro photos, but we’re certainly not yet satisfied with the current Explore experience. Work on the next iteration is underway!
• New 6K photo display option: Delivered! We promised 5K photos for Pros and wound up making it 6K. As of last week, we now support multi-click zoom to help you get the most out of them.
• 10 minute videos: Delivered!

What else did we accomplish together in 2019? Here’s a sample:

Community

• 2019 Year in Review and Your Best Shot: These end-of-year projects are annual highlights, and participation more than doubled this year. Check out 2019’s Top 25 photos on Flickr here, enjoy Galleries of some of our favorite submissions here, and check out all the amazing entries here.
• Flickr Events: We launched a new Events feature to highlight real-world and online events from our members, and we hosted a number of events ourselves, including the 2019 SPi Awards for Street Photography International, plus photowalk after photowalk after photowalk (and many more) in 2019.
• Group collaborations: We partnered with some world-class photographers and some dedicated group admins to run fun events and give away great prizes.
• Supporting great causes: We announced that all public Creative Commons works on Flickr are now protected from deletion, we created “in memoriam” accounts, and we granted thousands of free Pro accounts to support eligible non-profits.
• Flickr Commons: We continued our commitment to share hidden treasures from the world’s public photography archives by adding new members of the Commons.
• SmugMug Films: In partnership with SmugMug, we’ve launched several stunning films that give a behind-the-lens look at some of the world’s most exciting photographers.

Support

• New help center: In addition to hiring a large team of outstanding Support Heroes, we launched a redesigned Help Center to make it easier to find information or request assistance.
• Status page: We launched a status page and Twitter account to keep members apprised of any sitewide issues we’re currently tackling.

Product improvements

• Better curation: We launched a powerful new tool across the site that speeds up group invites, gallery creation, and album management. We’ve also improved the performance for each of these categories so our most dedicated curators can spend more time engaging with their communities.
• Mobile Pro Stats: We launched, and then had to remove, and then relaunched an improved stats experience on Flickr’s mobile apps for our Pro members (coming very soon for non-English speakers).
• Camera Roll: The surprisingly-beloved Camera Roll had to be rebuilt from scratch after our move to AWS, but it’s now up and running, much to members’ delight!
• Flickr Prints: We launched the ability for members to order truly spectacular prints and ready-to-hang wall art from the best pro labs around the world.
• Site stability and performance: Our migration to AWS has significantly improved site performance and uptime. We love hearing from members that Flickr is faster and more stable than ever, but we also know that we have plenty of room for growth, and we continue to prioritize these efforts.

This is just a small sampling of many projects we’ve worked on in 2019, and 2020 is already off to a great start. Read this for an update on 2020 plans!