[13] Flickr was launched on February 10, 2004, by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake.

[15][16] Early versions of Flickr focused on a chat room called FlickrLive, with real-time photo exchange capabilities.

[17] The successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing back-end for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map.

[26] Flickr upgraded its services from "beta" to "gamma" status on May 16, 2006, the changes attracted positive attention from Lifehacker.

[28] On April 9, 2008, Flickr began allowing paid subscribers to upload videos, limited to 90 seconds in length and 150 MB in size.

[29] In 2009, Flickr announced a partnership with Getty Images in which selected users could submit photographs for stock photography usage and receive payment.

[30] On May 20, 2013, Flickr launched the first stage of a major site redesign, introducing a "Justified View" close-spaced photo layout[31] browsed via "infinite scrolling" and adding new features, including one terabyte of free storage for all users, a scrolling home page (mainly of contacts photos and comments) and updated Android app.

[38] In early May 2019, SmugMug announced the migration of Flickr data, involving 100+ million accounts and billions of photos and videos, from the servers of former owner Yahoo!

The reasons cited were that the existing model was unsustainable by a medium-sized company which could not get revenues by selling profiles of the users.

[52] The paid option features "unlimited" storage, advanced statistics, advertising-free browsing, videos up to 10 minutes in length, "premier" customer service, and promotional offers with other partners.

[55] As a result of the SmugMug buyout, Flickr added the ability for users to download all of their account data, such as photo albums, contacts, and comments.

It allows users to modify tags, descriptions and set groupings, and to place photos on a world map (a feature provided in conjunction with Yahoo!

Users can select and apply changes to multiple photos at a time, as an alternative to the standard Flickr interface for editing.

Flickr also provides a "contact list" which can be used to control image access for a specific set of users in a way similar to that of LiveJournal.

In November 2006, Flickr created a "guest pass" system that allows private photos to be shared with non-Flickr members.

[64] Based on information compiled by highscalability.com, as of November 2007[update] the MySQL databases are hosted on servers that are Linux-based (from Red Hat), with a software platform that includes Apache, PHP (with PEAR and Smarty), shards, Memcached, Squid, Perl, ImageMagick and Java; the system administration tools include Ganglia, SystemImager, Subcon, and CVSup.

[67] Flickr provides a desktop client for Mac OS X and Windows that allows users to upload photos without using the web interface.

There are some restrictions on searches for certain types of users: non-members must always use SafeSearch, which omits images noted as potentially offensive, while members whose Yahoo!

[76] Flickr has used this filtering system to change the level of accessibility to "unsafe" content for entire nations, including South Korea, Hong Kong and Germany.

Flickr offers users the ability to either release their images under certain common usage licenses or label them as "all rights reserved".

The photos were initially posted with a Creative Commons Attribution license requiring that the original photographers be credited.

Flickr later created a new license which identified them as "United States Government Work", which does not carry any copyright restrictions.

[86] However, since then, its popularity has declined relative to social media platforms with photo sharing capabilities (such as Facebook and Instagram), as well as cloud file storage services (such as Dropbox).

[88] On June 12, 2007, in the wake of the rollout of localized language versions of the site, Flickr implemented a user-side rating system for filtering out potentially controversial photos.

subsidiaries in Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea were prevented from viewing photos rated "moderate" or "restricted" on the three-part scale used.

[89] Flickr management, unwilling to go into legal details, implied that the reason for the stringent filtering was some particularly strict age-verification laws in Germany.

[91] On June 20, 2007, Flickr reacted by granting German users access to "moderate" (but not "restricted") images, and hinted at a future solution for Germany, involving advanced age-verification procedures.

Under OCILLA, a service provider such as Flickr is obliged to delete or disable access to content as soon as they receive an official notice of infringement, to maintain protection from liability.

Although its use of the photos in this manner is legal and allowed under the licenses, Flickr was criticized by users for what they perceived to be unfair exploitation of artists' works, as all the profits from these offerings go to Yahoo!

and are not shared with their respective photographers, and users were not given a means of opting-out from the program without placing their photos under a more restrictive non-commercial license.