Archiving Flickr streams

Overview

Flickr is an online hosting service for uploading and sharing digital media such as photos and videos. Our software can crawl, archive, and replay Flickr photo streams, with some limitations.

Known issues

Social media platforms like Flickr can be difficult to archive. Currently, Flickr has the following issues which we continue to actively monitor:

• ⚠️ Flickr photostreams and albums currently replay in Wayback with the message "We're sorry, Flickr doesn't allow embedding within frames." We're working toward a solution.

You can find a full list of known issues for archiving various platforms on our Status of monitored platforms page.

On this page:

• How to select and format your Flickr seeds
• Scoping Flickr seeds
• What to expect from archived Flickr seeds

How to select and format your Flickr seeds

When archiving Flickr photo streams, add the main URL for the Flickr photo stream that you would like to archive. For example:

• https://www.flickr.com/photos/barbaraboxer/ 

Ensure there is a slash ( / ) at the end of the seed URL that you choose. This should enable you to archive all of one user's photos and comments without capturing any other users' streams.

Scoping Flickr seeds

No additional scoping is necessary for crawling Flickr seeds. 

What to expect from archived Flickr seeds

Our software can crawl, archive, and replay Flickr photo streams, with some limitations:

• Flickr's current design contains especially complicated and dynamically generated Javascript to service its contents, which makes crawling and especially replay challenging. 
• Because of the dynamic manner in which links from Flickr streams are generated, ensuring that individual photos' pages linked from the main stream are archived may require extensive Wayback QA.