Changelog

This page has a list of all the changes to the Commons Explorer, including screenshots!

November 2024

We welcomed three new members to the Flickr Commons, re-opening the doors after four years.
We improved the grid design so it can stretch to wiiiiiiiide screens. If you have a big screen, now you see even more photos at once!

Find recent photos from across the Flickr Commons. We’ve created a new page where you can see every photo uploaded by any member of the Flickr Commons.
Link to “No Known Copyright Restrictions” statements. Every member of the Flickr Commons has a statement on their own website where they explain how they use the No Known Copyright Restrictions (NKCR) license, and now we link to those statements from individual member pages.

Mark memorable moments on a map. We added several interactive maps, so you can see where Commons photos were taken.

On individual member pages, there’s a map where you can see the locations of every geotagged photo in that collection.

On the new global map page, there’s an interactive map where you can see the locations of every geotagged photo in the entire Flickr Commons. As you move around the map, you can also see a selection of the photos taken at that location.

Add a new stat: total views for every photo in Flickr Commons. This is when we first learnt that these photos have been collectively viewed over four billion times.
Fetch recent photos directly from Flickr.com, not the local database. This means that when a member uploads a new photo, it will show up on their member page immediately – previously it would take a few hours to show up.

Catch up on Conversations. The new conversations page lets you see discussions which are happening across the Flickr Commons.

You’ll see immediately the fantastic community that’s grown up around members like the National Library of Ireland’s photostream, and get to know some of the volunteer researchers inhabiting and contributing their time and detective skills to enrich the Commons.

To complement this new page, we added a graph of comments per month to the stats page.
Tell the tale of terrific tags. We added a “tags” section to the stats page which shows the total number of unique tags used across Flickr Commons (nearly 600k) and highlights some of the most popular tags – that is, tags which are used by lots of different members.

See some Stats. This page tells you about activity across the collection. To kick things off, we showed the total number of photos in Flickr Commons (1.8 million) and a list of members who’ve uploaded photos recently. We plan to add more stats soon!
Add Search. This bone simple search means you can quickly see a splat of pictures about just about anything, from across the entire Commons collection. Even with a few million photos, there’s a huge range of tagging and other description happening. Jump into London, pie, Istanbul, and smiles, or just look for the magnifying glass in the top right of the nav bar.

Launch the Flickr Commons Explorer. This first version includes the homepage, a list of Flickr Commons members, and per-member pages giving more detail about each member.

The homepage has a list of recent uploads from across the Commons collection, and a sample of our members.

The list page shows you every Flickr Commons member, and you can sort the list in different ways. Each member has their own page, where you can see their popular tags, interesting photos, and recent uploads.