Flickr Announces Policies for Creative Commons Photos and Accounts for Deceased Members

Flickr has made a range of changes to its service ever since coming under new ownership.

Today the website announced even further clarifications about account statuses moving forward.

Mainly, a lot of people were concerned that the photos taken by deceased members of the Flickr community would be deleted as time passed.

The company confirmed that this will not be the case and, in a nod to Facebook’s memorial accounts, Flickr will be rolling out an “in memoriam” account feature to safeguard these photographers and their work in a kind of digital cache.

Discussing the changes on their blog, Flickr writes, “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.”

Also the company is basically letting Creative Commons upload as many photos as possible to the website.

The blog states, “Creative Commons licenses have been an important part of Flickr since we introduced them on our platform in 2004…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.”