Flickr Makes It Just A Bit Harder To Find Creative Commons Images (UPDATED)

By Nicole Dieker June 9, 2014

UPDATE: See the comments, this is a Flickr UI issue that has since been resolved.

If you’re a freelance writer or otherwise part of the Giant Internet Content Machine, you probably spend a lot of time on Flickr.

After all, it’s where the vast majority of Creative Commons images are located.

But be careful: Flickr just changed its UI to make it slightly harder to find what you’re looking for.

In “the old days,” which is to say “last Wednesday,” Flickr let you search CC photos directly through its Explore Creative Commons section.

Now, searching through that link dumps you back out into Flickr’s global search results. That is to say: searching through Explore Creative Commons returns results that are not Creative Commons. Instead, you have to go to a drop-down menu in the top left corner and re-select that you only want CC pictures — and you can’t select the specific license you want anymore, either.

This is the second Flickr change in recent months that makes it harder to use and share Creative Commons images. As Cory Doctorow noted this April, Flickr essentially “broke” the ability to attribute CC photos appropriately. Now that Flickr is making it harder to find good CC images, it will be interesting to see if we all abandon it in favor of a site more interested in supporting Creative Commons.

(And if there is one that’s better than Flickr, let me know.)

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