I just pulled a 2006 and uploaded my holiday photos to Flickr with a Creative Commons Licence

I just returned from a holiday on the gorgeous island of Corfu in Greece and spent quite some time taking photos. Instead of releasing those piecemeal on various social media channels, I thought it would be fun to go back to our ways of early social media, and put them all up on Flickr with a CC licence so you can use them. Some make great materials for image manipulation, others are great backdrops for your video calls.

You can see them all on Flickr :

Here are the albums:

• Corfu2024 Nature – 408 Photos
• Corfu2024 Buildings – 418 Photos
• Corfu2024 Textures – 29 Photos
• Corfu2024 Technology and Vehicles – 95 Photos, 1 Video
• Corfu2024 Signs and Statues – 225 Photos, 1 Video
• Corfu2024 Food and Animals – 84 Photos, 2 Videos

For those not on Flickr, you can also get them as Zips:

• Buildings.zip (1.28GB)
• Food and Animals.zip (422MB)
• Textures.zip (118MB)
• Nature.zip (2.52GB)
• Signs and Statues.zip (750MB)
• Technology.zip (352MB)

I really miss the early days of social media and especially the Flickr community. I was lucky enough to have worked with the people who built Flickr and then joined Yahoo and the community aspect of the product was what really made it work. You uploaded a few high quality photos and people would tag themselves and others in them. People would add descriptions and comment in full sentences and not just likes. And the thing that made Flickr really special was that everything was API driven and it was incredibly easy to embed the images in other products and create mashups.

The idea was to add to a web of data and allow your creative output to be re-used, mixed and added to other materials. Not to feed one addiction machine and not even have access to your own work a few seconds later. It is a shame that we lost that, and the bigger issue is that any system that allows for tagging or adding comments drowns in spam and AI slop within seconds now.

We skipped the “social” part of Social Media quite some time ago. But hey, maybe you have some joy seeing how gorgeous this island is!