We recently upgraded the look and feel of the Base Backpackers hostel pages and introduced a feature we had been developing for awhile (those who have seem the Adventure Tours Australia website would have seen it before) – that is, the displaying of images onto the website that sit on Flickr.
The idea here is that we take an RSS feed directly from our these pages and then display the most recent 20 or so images. This works fantastic for a company such as Base which has 14 hostels across Australia and New Zealand and a continually growing mountain of images that are taken almost daily by staff, customers and friends.
A lot can change in a week in a hostel and there is just so much going on from regular parties in the hostel bar to activities and local events. By using a Flickr account we can give access to all the hostel and bar managers who can easily update their photos in real time without the need to continually go back to the website content manager to get new photos. It keeps the images fresh and gets everyone from the crew to the customer buy in – hey that’s me in the bar the other night!
I have said this before in my articles etc, but Flickr also provides a parallel marketing medium. For example someone looking for images on Magnetic Island on Flickr might come across Base or the Full Moon Party and subsequently be enticed to investigate Base Magnetic Island hostel as the place to stay.
We are currently in the process of extending the functionality such that we also pull in the description and tags of the images as they appear on the Flickr site and are displayed on Base, Adventure Tours etc websites.
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Hey mate – what are the current rules governing this? I looked into it a few years ago and the previous Flickr Terms of Use were:
“Flickr is intended for personal use and is not a generic image hosting service. Professional or corporate uses of Flickr are prohibited.”
When I looked again last year these had changed – though it still seemed a grey area:
“Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes. Flickr is for personal use only… ”
And lot of the discussions I read since still point it being against the terms for a company to use Flickr as an image hosting service for their commercial website (even if you have a valid API account and so forth – as the commercial use of this seems to surround what you build i.e. the application – rather than it’s use).
Just wondering if you have had any experience with this – as I’d still like to incorporate the same type of system as you mention above into our websites (I’d developed an upload system based on their APU for staff and web visitors to submit their photos directly to our Flickr account via our website – however never ended up using it for the above reasons).
Hi Andrew, yeah it seems like a grey area, but we purchased a pro account for all the examples above and in the promotional material it says for holding large quantities of photos for businesses etc.
Cool – I’ll have to look into it.
At the time I was just a little apprehensive about basing an important part of the site (i.e. the imagery) on a third party server when I was unsure whether or not that could suspend the account at some later date.
Though from what you say the Pro account guidelines have changed – so should be all okay now.
Just looking on the forums – I think the approach is okay – check out http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/29690/ (though there is heaps of other threads on the subject)
Stewart response from Flickr – re their hard line ethos approach is very informative.
I’ve got a social network and considering using Flickr to host the networks + Google AppEngine to host the app, it’s not commercial and i’ll never make any money out of it so does that break the terms of use for Flickr.
Sounds like it wouldn’t but I dunno?
What do people think?
I like your approach, offloading images to an external provider. Do you use a Pro account?
Are you able to have separate accounts for hostel and bar managers or are they all using the same account?
Thanks again for this idea!
I am a professional photographer based in New Zealand.
If you were using my pictures from my Flickr account on your website without my written consent I will ask for payment of my fees.
If you were to refuse payment I would sue you and win.
There are good reasons many of us professional photographers do not use flickr. This kind of usage ranks among the top reasons.