The Flickr Commons turns 16

The Flickr Commons celebrates its 16^th birthday on 16^th January 2024. Since launching in 2008 with the Library of Congress, the Flickr Commons has been sharing treasures from the world’s photography archives, with more than 100 members.

The National Library of Ireland began its Flickr journey in 2010 when we experimented by posting images of a range of items from our ephemera collections. The National Library officially became a member of the Flickr Commons in June 2011 and started sharing photographs from our collections with a worldwide audience on Flickr. We have remained active on the platform ever since. With more than 5 million photographs in our collections, we don’t anticipate running low on images to post for a very long time. To this day, our posts on the Flickr Commons often range between our photographic collections and reproductions of visual items from other collections that highlight the diversity and uniqueness of our holdings.

We welcome involvement and engagement from the general public to help keep this project going. If you wish to contribute some information, ask a question or add a comment, then just set up a free Flickr account. Join in the conversation and help us to mark many more Flickr Commons birthdays to come.

You can access the National Library of Ireland Flickr Commons page here.

1) Fisherman and boatbuilder Tadhg Devane at Portmagee, Co. Kerry (TIL745)
Tadhg Devane was identified by a Flickr user as the subject of this photograph, taken by Richard Tillbrook, in one of our Flickr posts. He was a fisherman and boat-builder from Portmagee, Co. Kerry, and was aged about fifty-eight around the time this photograph was taken in 1963.

2) Man sitting outside furniture shop, Merchant's Arch, Temple Bar, Co, Dublin (WIL 57[9])
The child in this photograph (taken by Elinor Wiltshire in 1969) self-identified as Colm Irwin in the comments section of this Flickr post. He shared that he would have been about three years old at the time, and that he is now “[a] good bit taller and I still have my own teeth”. This connection was reported in the media.

3) Tea and Coffee van at Ballybricken Fair, Waterford City (POOLEWP 2103)
This particular photograph from our Poole Collection, taken on 4 May 1910, gained huge traction when we posted it on Flickr. It remains our most viewed Flickr post to date, having gathered upwards of 600,000 views.