[cc-community] Non-evil alternative to Flickr?

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Wed Jun 4 23:12:45 EDT 2008


On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 7:29 PM, Chris Watkins
<chriswaterguy at appropedia.org> wrote:
> I want to share my photos, and use CC licenses. I'd prefer not to use Flickr
> (or any other Yahoo service) due to their shameful behavior, helping to hand
> over to the Chinese government those who dared to criticize it.
>
> At the same time, a one-person boycott is pointless and I need to find a
> place to share my photos.  I did blog about this question but didn't get any
> suggestions.

http://www.ipernity.com is one site that is basically like Flickr and
allows choosing CC licenses for photos (but unfortunately doesn't have
a CC portal or advanced search like Flickr does).

http://www.zooomr.com is another, same lack.

They both have much smaller communities than Flickr, though ipernity
looks surprisingly busy, considering I've more or less never heard of
it -- I don't recall how I ran across it.

> http://fffff.at/fuckflickr-info sums it up pithily but I don't think I want
> to point my friends and family at that url. But if someone set up as a
> competitor to Flickr, using that (open source) software, and making it
> possible to tag with CC licenses, that would be tempting.
>
> Of course as the various social media are becoming more interconnected these
> days, there wouldneed to be some kind of open protocol that would enable
> one's photos to be easily shared on Facebook, friendfeed etc, if they were
> to have a hope of providing a realistic alternative.
>
> Any ideas? I suspect there is no real alternative but I don't want to give
> up without a final attempt to find one.

There are real alternatives if you just want to avoid Flickr.

If you have a higher bar than that (I'll wildly extrapolate from the
above that you'd ideally like an "open service" that published its
source and made migration transparent), I don't know of anything,
other than running some gallery software on your own site/domain name,
but that loses the most of the community aspect that you get with a
site like Flickr.

http://commons.wikimedia.org is awesome in every respect but it isn't
a photo sharing site for whatever personal dreck you feel like
uploading http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope :)

Mike



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