Flickr’s Data Lifeboat Will Preserve Photos and Their Context for 100 Years
The Flickr Foundation, an independent non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the world’s shared visual culture, has announced the beta release of a new archiving tool that is designed to preserve photos and their surrounding social context for 100 years: Data Lifeboat.
Data Lifeboat promises to allow Flickr members to create archives — what it describes as portable, browsable mini-websites — that package a set of Flickr photos together along with their metadata, comments, favorites, and curation. The idea is that each archive isn’t just a set of photos, but the context around them that makes them meaningful. Data Lifeboat users can save their own photos as well as include other photographers’ content (with their consent), which the Flickr Foundation says opens new possibilities for curators, researchers, and creative remixers.
“When you upload a photo to Flickr, you’re not just sharing an image, you’re contributing to a living cultural record,” George Oates, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Flickr Foundation, says. “Data Lifeboat ensures that record isn’t lost to time, creating a lightweight, usable archive that can travel safely into the future without losing that valuable context, which is usually the first thing to disappear. “Publishing collections through Flickr Commons transforms static archives into living conversations. We’ve seen people identify forgotten relatives, rediscover lost histories, and share expert knowledge across continents.”
“With Data Lifeboat, we’re showing that archiving can be both ethical and accessible,” Ben MacAskill, President, COO at SmugMug and Flickr, adds. “It’s about empowering individuals and institutions to take preservation into their own hands, ensuring their digital histories remain visible and usable for generations.”
As part of the launch, the Flickr Foundation shared a showcase of five photo series to demonstrate how Data Lifeboat works. For example, the “Brighton Swimming Club” gallery shows an archive of photos of the club from 2003 to 2023.
“From 2003 to 2023 I worked as a freelance photographer, but I would always take photos of Brighton Swimming Club’s sea swimming activities for fun. I have been a member of Brighton Swimming Club sea swimming section since I moved to Brighton in 2003 and have swam all round in the sea ever since. These photos show friends and family some of whom have since passed so they are very dear to me,” Kevin Meredith writes of this series. “When I joined the club in 2003 the club had small run down changing facility with 20 or so regularly sea swimmers just west of Brighton Palace Pier, the club now has a better facility which was moved into in 2012 just east of the pier. Just after COVID, we had 250 sea swimming members at the club’s peak. I have been honored to witness a small slice of the club’s history and I am sure the club will still be here long after I am gone.”
The Flicker Foundation says that this and other early pilot archives created with Data Lifeboat show how it can preserve digital culture at scale while at the same time deepening connections between communities and photo collections.
“The Data Lifeboat service continues the Flickr Foundation’s mission by giving both institutions and individuals the tools to preserve digital culture with consent and care, ensuring that the world’s most vibrant visual histories remain discoverable for the next century,” the Flicker Foundation says.
The beta release of the Data Lifeboat tool is available now for all Flickr account holders.
Image credits: Photographs Kevin Meredith courtesy of Flickr
