As the year wraps up, we wanted to share some of what the Flickr Foundation has been working on. It’s been a year of learning, launching, and connecting with people who care about preserving digital photographs.

Here are the highlights from the team for this year:

Data Lifeboat Launches!

After a lot of development work, we released alpha and beta versions of Data Lifeboat this year. It’s been wonderful—and a bit nerve-wracking—to see people actually using the tool to preserve their photo collections. We’re learning from user feedback and working to make it better. Our hope is to call V1 done before the holiday season begins in earnest.

We created the Flickr Commons 1k Collection as a proof of concept and published it on the Internet Archive. Juwon’s fantastic intro video helped explain what we’re trying to do, and we’ve started exploring how to sustain this work long-term. The commercial pathways we’re investigating should help ensure the tool can continue serving the communities who need it.

Listening to the Community

Nearly 3,000 people responded to our digital legacy survey through Flickr.com in November. This many responses may be some kind of world record in online surveys!? We’re still processing what we learned, but the response showed us just how much people think about what happens to their photos and digital presence.

“I would like to have my photos available to others with similar interests, after I am gone. All my photos are annotated, which has taken a lot of time over the years. I think the backstory of each gives the photo experience more value.”

The survey results are guiding our thinking going forward, and we’re looking forward to running interviews in Q1 2026. It’s clear that questions about digital legacy matter deeply to people, and we’re working to understand how we can better support caring for these important (digital) things.

Sharing with the Community

We’ve continued to share our content and our news with our community via various channels and outlets. We maintain an active social media presence on: Bluesky (67 posts, 1611 followers), Mastodon (68 posts, 1543 followers), Instagram (23 posts, 98 followers, early days!), LinkedIn (49 posts, 788 followers).

Supporting the Commons

We welcomed four new members to Flickr Commons and tried to make the onboarding process smoother for future partners. Our quarterly Commons Connect meetings in January, April, July, and October have helped us stay connected with institutional partners, and it was a pleasure to see our new members showing up for a chat.

We’ve been steadily building a list of organizations which already have Flickr accounts who might be good fits for the Commons down the road. Reaching out is slow, steady work, and luckily, Jessamyn is fantastic at circling back.

It turns out the US government has been a resolute user of Flickr, pretty much since it launched in the naughties. Given the tumult, we’ve used our own tools to create a unique archive representing how the government has used visual social media at the beginning of the 21st century. We’re looking for a Proper Home for this special collection.

Flickr.com did a great job rolling out CC 4.0 licensing this year too, which was good to see.

Shifts in the Team

We were lucky to welcome Dan as Tech co-lead, said farewell to Alex, invited Hope to join as our pro bono legal advisor, and added Jonty to the team as Tech co-lead. The team has variously been in the same place (not little windows) too, getting to meet in person in London and LA, which reminded us how valuable face-to-face time is.

Research and Learning

We wrapped up our 2024 Mellon grant to move Data Lifeboat forward and published the final report in March. We’ve been fortunate to present this work at conferences in Paris, Florence, Barcelona, and Utrecht, and we have two peer-reviewed papers in the works. Students at the Royal College of Art are using Data Lifeboat to think about how different elements of their city are captured by a spectating public, and at the Utrecht University, who are thinking about data injustices in collective archives.

We hosted an event at The Photographers’ Gallery with Matthew Plummer-Fernandez and Sam Mercer, and connected with folks at Europeana, MozFest, Fantastic Futures, and other gatherings throughout the year. These conversations continue to shape our understanding of the work ahead.

Anna Mladentseva joined us for an AHRC-funded research placement and helped us understand where Data Lifeboat fits in the broader social media archiving landscape and think through what keeping a snapshot archive up-to-date could be like. Molly Sherman and Emily Fitzgerald, and Oreoluwa Akinyode contributed as our 2025 Research Fellows.

Building Infrastructure

A lot of our work this year involved less visible work: crafting privacy policies, terms of service, volunteer agreements, and grant applications (sadly with no success!). We continue to learn a lot from the grant process, even when things don’t go our way. The US funding environment we operate in is undeniably chaotic this year.

But! Some good news: We welcomed Rachel L. Frick as our third board member, and joined Fastly’s Fast Forward program which is supporting our Data Lifeboat service. We have mapped out an early Accessible Archives strategy, experimented with Hugging Face for better image descriptions, and commissioned Jill Blackmore-Evans to explore Reflective Archiving.

Thank You

We’re grateful to everyone who’s supported this work—our community of donors, institutional partners, volunteers, and the team making it happen. We are such a small group it’s a thrill to deploy a product that people will buy (and have bought!). There’s still so much to figure out, but we’re heading into 2026 with a clearer sense of how we can help preserve the photographs that matter to people and our desire to contribute to the Commons of the future remains as strong as ever.

Onward!