There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Flickr users who say they’re victims of copyright violation and outright theft. Flickr, quite possibly the Internet’s largest and most popular photo sharing website with 525 million photos posted (as of June 2007), is truly a phenomenon for all types of photographers, from novice to professional. It is Flickr’s vast reach and tremendous ease of use that has generated its success over the years, and the reason it was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. But this success doesn’t come without a hefty price tag.

David Pogue, from the NYTimes, wrote:

With 525 million photos posted so far, Flickr may be the largest photo site. But its strengths are social interaction and personal expression, like a visual blog. For example, 75 percent of Flickr photos have been made available for public browsing, commenting, downloading and subscribing.

People are weird. Simply put. In the past twenty-four hours, we’ve come across a handful of Flickr users who’ve marked some of our (and some of our friend’s) photos as favorites. Now, let it be known these aren’t photographs capturing beautiful sunsets or the views from a 14,000’ peak or us sitting on a bench in our garden laughing. Conversely, nor are they “Miss New Jersey� style shots or anything otherwise compromising to our integrity – they’re frozen moments in time in which the focus happens to be on a female. And that’s where it gets creepy.

Entire Flickr accounts are dedicated to saving photographs of women – old, young, tall, short, skinny, overweight, blonde, brunette, clothed, nude, sitting, standing – as their favorites. Their profile thumbnails are commonly flaming pitchforks or skulls and crossbones.

I chased down some help topics on Flickr looking for an answer. This made all of us generally uncomfortable. Ironically enough, we’re not alone. Unfortunately, Flickr doesn’t offer much in terms of shelter. You can block the person, but does that really protect someone?

We ultimately decided to immediately lock down our entire Flickr account and limit it to friends and family only. To see what photographs we’ve taken, we have to invite you to be one of our contacts. And how sad this is. Especially when 1) it’s fun to share, 2) it’s fun to be part of such a large community of talented photographers, and 3) there’s a ton of people out there making a lot of money by doing nothing on Flickr.

Proceed with caution.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 3 pm and is filed under family, friends, photography, websites.