Who FediFlick Archive Is Actually For

Last time I wrote here about stepping back from Flickr, I said the part worth carrying forward wasn’t the app, it was a practice: license generously, credit properly, treat a photo as something meant to be shared rather than hoarded. I left an obvious question sitting there, unanswered on purpose: shared with whom, and for what. “Everyone who takes photos” isn’t a real audience, and I don’t want to spend a small, community-funded project’s limited attention building for one that doesn’t exist.

So here’s an honest attempt at an answer, and it starts by naming who I’m deliberately not building for.

The Photographers I’m Not Building For

SmugMug does a genuinely good job for people who care about getting a photograph to look right: exposure, colour, composition, the whole craft side of the medium, plus a real business built around portfolios and print sales. That’s skill, and it’s real work, and whatever’s gone wrong with Flickr’s app this year, there’s still a deep, deserving community of people on that platform who value exactly that. Scot Hacker’s 2021 essay “Flickr is no ghost town” is a good account of what that community still gets from the platform: an interest group for every niche, full-resolution viewing, and comment threads from people who understand what an image takes to make. I have no interest in trying to out-build SmugMug’s editing tools, and trying would be a waste of the little attention a project like this has to spend. If that’s what you’re after, Flickr and SmugMug remain the better home for it, genuinely, not as a consolation prize.

That’s not where I think the gap actually is.

The People I Actually Have in Mind

Four groups, and none of them are thinking about aperture or colour grading when they pick up a camera or scroll through an old album. If there’s a collective name for the people on this side of the line, it’s digital image storytellers: the photograph is how the story gets told, not the point of the exercise.

The first, and honestly the one I underweighted when I first started thinking this through out loud, is communities documenting a subject rather than a family: a region’s disappearing architecture, agricultural land use as it changes decade to decade, a specific species or habitat tracked by people who actually go out and look for it. What they have in common isn’t the subject, it’s the posture: document what’s actually there, don’t improve it, and stay with it as it changes, including the slow work of neglect and decay once people leave the scene.

There’s an academic name for the people-and-place relationship this posture rests on, anthropogeography, the study of people in relation to where they’ve lived, a term largely out of use now. Michael Coghlan, whose Flickr feed I mentioned in the first post, took that superseded word in 2016 and redefined it for his own photography as anthrogeography: people, places, the mark each leaves on the other, and what happens to a place once the people have gone. He works solo rather than in a crowd, and it’s one person’s word for one person’s practice, not a school or a group, but it names the posture better than “documentary” does: photographs as evidence of people belonging somewhere, over time.

What sets this group apart from the others is scale. A dedicated documentary Group, built by dozens or hundreds of contributors adding photos over years, holds a collective archive that no individual could produce alone. The largest subject-specific groups on Flickr hold millions of photos from tens of thousands of contributors. That kind of corpus only exists because many hands built it. That’s not a small audience. It might be the biggest one on this list.

The second is the person with a phone and a reason to be there: citizen photojournalists, visual documentarians, people who use photographs to bear witness to events and conditions that matter to a community or a public record, not to win a portfolio review. The volunteer who photographs every prescribed burn in a fire district. The local who documents every demolition on their street over a decade. The person at the council meeting who photographs the whiteboard before someone erases it. What they share with the community-archive group above is the documentary posture: record what’s actually there. What separates them is that the impulse is often individual rather than collective, and the output is journalistic: it matters because of when and where it was made, not because it’s beautiful.

These people already exist in large numbers. Phone cameras and social media have produced millions of them. But the platforms they post to (Instagram, Facebook, X) are terrible archives: no stable URLs, no licensing clarity, no bulk export, algorithmic burial that makes last week’s documentation nearly impossible to find. A wire service photographer has an editor, a publication, and an archive. A citizen photojournalist usually has a phone and no succession plan for the images on it.

The third is genealogists and family historians, and everyone who travels specifically to the town their grandmother left, the church a great-grandfather was married in, the street that shows up in one faded photo with no caption. It’s the same anthropogeography as the first group, narrowed from a region or a species to a single family’s line. And the practical gap is sharp: most genealogists’ photo finds live on one person’s Flickr account with no succession plan. When that person dies or deletes, the photos vanish from the record.

The fourth is older adults, using photographs to reconnect with their own past. This isn’t just a nice idea, it’s a studied one: reminiscence therapy, using photos and other tangible cues to prompt recall and discussion of earlier life, is a recognised psychosocial practice, and systematic reviews of it report real, measurable improvements in life satisfaction, self-esteem, and reduced depressive symptoms, including in people with no cognitive impairment at all, not only in memory-care settings. Picture a daughter pulling up her mother’s wedding photo on a tablet in a care home, and her mother naming everyone in the frame for the first time in years. A photo, for this group, isn’t content. It’s a way back into a life.

Bigger Than It Sounds

It’s tempting to file all four under “niche,” and the numbers say otherwise even before you get to the real point. Genealogy tourism, people travelling specifically to the places connected to their own ancestry, is a real, well-documented, worldwide market: Ireland alone recorded roughly 116,000 genealogy tourists in a single year at its peak. That’s one country, one diaspora pattern, in one snapshot year.

But the real opportunity isn’t the size of any one audience, it’s the size of what a documentary community produces together. A single person’s own photo library, however dedicated they are, tops out somewhere in the thousands over a lifetime. A Group of contributors documenting a region’s architecture, or a wetland’s bird population, or a neighbourhood’s slow redevelopment, over years, produces a corpus that’s orders of magnitude bigger than that, and it belongs to everyone who added to it, not to whoever happens to run the server it’s stored on. Wikipedia alone has hundreds of thousands of articles flagged as needing a photograph. The raw material to fill those gaps already exists, scattered across private accounts on platforms that don’t make it easy to find, license, or reuse. That’s the actual gap: there isn’t a photo-first, community-owned home for collections like that today.

A Program That Got There First

Flickr itself has one genuine precedent for exactly this idea, and it predates any of my own thinking on the subject by close to two decades: the Commons, Flickr’s long-running program with libraries, archives, and museums, publishing historical photographs with no known copyright restrictions and inviting the public to help identify and describe them. It’s one of the best examples I know of a platform treating photographs as heritage rather than as content, crowd-curated, genuinely collaborative, and still running. I mention it here with real admiration, not as a lead-in to anything, it’s evidence the instinct behind this post isn’t a new one, just one I think deserves a purpose-built home rather than a corner of a much bigger platform.

Where This Leaves the App

FediFlick Archive, the storage-and-community layer I’ve sketched out in the project’s own planning documents, is being built for digital image storytellers, not photographers. That shapes real, specific decisions. For a citizen photojournalist, it means stable URLs and clear licensing from the moment of upload, not bolted on later. For a genealogist, it means a photo’s location and date metadata are displayed as prominently as the image itself, because when and where matter more than how. For a community archive, it means the Group outlives its individual contributors: the collection survives even when the people who built it move on. What gets displayed prominently on a photo is the story behind it, not the shutter speed. None of that is built yet, it’s still a plan, not a product. But it’s a plan aimed at a real audience I can name, rather than a vague hope that “photographers in general” will show up.

Part two of five in the FediFlick & Digital Commons series. Previously: Not a Good Riddance Post. Next: .

Sources

• Coghlan, M. “Anthrogeography”, Michael Coghlan (blog), December 2016. Reaching past “photographer” for a word that covers people, places, and how each shapes the other, and photographing “what happens when people leave the scene: the process of neglect, incremental change, and slow decay.”
• “Effectiveness on Quality of Life and Life Satisfaction for Older Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Life Review and Reminiscence Therapy across Settings”, PMC.
• “The Effectiveness of Reminiscence Therapy on Alleviating Depressive Symptoms in Older Adults: A Systematic Review”, PMC.
• “Genealogy tourism”, Wikipedia, for the Ireland genealogy-tourism figures cited above.
• Flickr Commons, Flickr’s own long-running public-domain heritage-photography program.
• Hacker, S. “Flickr is no ghost town”. Medium, September 2021, on what the photographer community still values in Flickr.
• FediFlick project documentation (README.md), the author’s own AGPL-licensed Fediverse posting client.

Related reading: Not a Good Riddance Post, on why even the thought of stepping back from Flickr feels like grief rather than victory.

• FediFlick
• Photojournalism
• Digital Storytelling
• Flickr
• Genealogy
• Digital Sovereignty
• Creative Commons
• Open Source