Comments on: Using Flickr for website images

By: John

John — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:58:25 +0000

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?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 04:30:46 +0000

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.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 03:22:18 +0000

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.

By: xebidy

xebidy — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:18:24 +0000

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.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:48:08 +0000

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:

“DonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢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).