Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

A Data Lifeboat is a tool for preserving images from Flickr.com. It creates a file that contains not just a selection of photos from Flickr.com and their technical metadata, but also the social metadata - the comments, likes, and curation that surround a photo and provide a much richer context. It’s our solution to the challenge of preserving your collections of pictures from Flickr.com in an easy-to-use, self-contained, long-lasting package that is conscious of the unique ethical and legal issues raised by networked images and their social context.

You can add any photos from Flickr.com that you can access. So if someone has shared an image with you, or made it public, you can add it to your Data Lifeboat (although other people’s images require their permission - see FAQ #4). The process of creating a Data Lifeboat also guides you through the process of creating a ‘README’ file, where you can add anything else you think would be interesting or important for future viewers of your Data Lifeboat to know. For example, how and why you chose these particular images, what you want future viewers to understand, and how you would like them to be used (or not!).

Anyone who is a Flickr member and logged in to their Flickr account can make a Data Lifeboat. As we are still at a relatively early stage in the development, we are only opening up to alpha testers. If you know someone else who would be interested in testing it, please let us know and we will add them!

Yes, kind of... If they’ve shared the image with you and also given permission for it to be included in your Data Lifeboat, you can add it. That doesn’t mean you need to notify everyone though - the tool itself handles the permissions. So if you choose someone else’s photo for your Data Lifeboat, they get a message telling them that someone would like to include it in their Data Lifeboat and they have X days to respond. By default, if they don’t respond within that period, the photo is not included in your Data Lifeboat.

Your photo can’t end up in someone else’s Data Lifeboat without your permission. If one of your photos is chosen by someone else for their Data Lifeboat, you will be notified via a comment on the photo in Flickr and directed to a website where you can choose to give permission or not. If you don’t respond, or don’t want the photo to be included, it will not be added.

No. While we are testing the software, creating a Data Lifeboat is free.

We collect basic data such as your username, the email address associated with your Flickr.com account, your location, the URLs of the photos you request, and any preferences you set while using the Data Lifeboat.

We also collect the information you include in the README. You are entirely in control of whether you share any personal data or private information in your README. For example, you might choose to disclose your name, credentials, or professional affiliation, or say why these photos are important to you. Please note that by choosing to include such personal data you are providing the Flickr Foundation with your consent to the collection and processing of this data.

For full details of what data we collect and what we do with it, please see our privacy policy.

There’s no easy answer to this question. But if you approach it as an art curator would, you’d be looking to carefully select photos that align with an overriding theme or message, ensuring that each one contributes to the story you’re trying to tell. Don’t forget that you can also use the README to tell the story of why you chose this particular set of pictures, and what you’d like a viewer in, say 100 years, to know about what they show.

The purpose of the README is to encourage Data Lifeboat creators who might not be professional archivists, to consider the complex issues of purpose, future access, storage, context, cultural sensitivities, privacy, and copyright. At the Flickr Foundation, we think about preserving for the long term and we want Data Lifeboats to be kept for at least 100 years. This means that accurately describing and providing context for a selection of images becomes very important and makes it much easier for future viewers to understand. The Data Lifeboat README tool guides you through this process, and provides helpful hints about what you could include. We’ve designed it based on the FAIR and CARE principles that are used by professional archivists worldwide.

a. Give me an example of a good README?

Sure! We’ve prepared three example Data Lifeboats, each with its own README, which you can download and read in our showcase.

Flickr.com is a commercial photosharing platform that has a 20-year history. It holds tens of billions of images, making it one of the largest collections of images of its kind.

The Flickr Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation established in 2022, and its purpose is to keep Flickr pictures accessible for the next 100 years. Read more about the Flickr Foundation at www.flickr.org.

Great! Please let us know via the Data Lifeboat Alpha Testing Group on Flickr.com, or via email at bugs@datalifeboat.org.

Tell us via our social media channels - Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon or hello@datalifeboat.org.

Now you have your “freshly baked” Data Lifeboat you can save it to your hard disc, cloud storage, or send it to someone who would enjoy seeing it. What you do with it next is up to you.

We often hear that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine “has everything”, and while it is undoubtedly an indispensable tool it does not (and cannot) capture all of Flickr. It can only crawl the public web and cannot access all the photos on Flickr because they have private or semi-private sharing permissions set by the creator which means they require authentication to view. As a project of the Flickr Foundation, the Data Lifeboat is in a unique position to be able to tackle this issue of access to authenticated materials.

We want to supplement and support the groundbreaking work of the Internet Archive: they shouldn’t just be called in desperation at the 11th hour to crawl and grasp for as much as they can get before the service sinks (which is the position they are often placed in!).

What’s more, we firmly believe the social metadata created in Flickr has cultural value and as far as we know, there are no other social media platforms investigating how to meaningfully preserve this form of shared cultural heritage. Most platforms have industry-standard backups and data dump options, but these backups will only last as long as the platform does. So a new journey has begun with Flickr.com and the Flickr Foundation.

We want to develop it into a fully tested, robust product that is used by individuals and institutions alike to preserve these networked images for future generations to enjoy. We’d love to see Flickr being used as the photo sharing platform of choice for cultural heritage organizations (particularly the millions of small archives and museums around the world, that don’t have the budget to develop their own infrastructure) and for Data Lifeboats to become the de facto standard for collecting and preserving these images and their metadata. We’re also thinking about how to create a Safe Harbor Network - a distributed network of servers at cultural institutions around the world where these Data Lifeboats can be preserved for the long term. Let us know if you’d like to be involved!

Let us know which platform you’re interested in by emailing us at hello@datalifeboat.org. But for the time being, Data Lifeboat only works with Flickr.com.