An Archive of the Smithsonian Institution's Flickr Commons account

This Data Lifeboat was created by George Oates on 1 July 2026.

Why are you making this particular Data Lifeboat?
I made this archive to send across to the Public Data Project at Harvard University - https://lil.law.harvard.edu/our-work/public-data-project/. They are working on preservation of and access to large government-oriented datasets. In 2025, they also gathered about 700TB of open data from the Smithsonian Institution for safekeeping, and this Data Lifeboat is a small supplement to that.

This archive contains 3,308 photographs, but maybe more importantly, it also contains all the "social metadata" that has been added to the photographs by the Flickr community: tags, comments, curation... basically anything added by people once the photos have been uploaded. This is unique to the Flickr context, so it'll be great to add in to the PDP's Smithsonian archive.

What's important to you about these photos?
I am the creator of the Flickr Commons program, and you can imagine how proud I was when, back in 2008, the Smithsonian Institution signed on as our third partner. I had the pleasure of working with the late, great, Effie Kapsalis to get them set up, and thoroughly enjoyed the SI Archive's curation of photography over the years. All of these photographs are historic, of course, but for me, they are important because of when and how the Smithsonian joined into the nascent program I had created.

Of course, I should note for the record that I do not own any of these photographs. They were published into the Flickr Commons program with no known copyright restrictions.

What is it for?
This Data Lifeboat was built for personal, educational, commercial, archiving and machine learning use.

Places taken

© OpenStreetMap contributors

4.9% of the photos in this Data Lifeboat have locations.