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Overview

Our members come first. They own the photographs on Flickr, share their photos with the Flickr community, and they're the reason Flickr is a great place to be. They deserve respect and credit for what they create, and you can do so with your application by respecting their rights as the photo owners.

Please keep in mind that the API is a very powerful tool that gives you access to millions of photos by people who are passionate about their images. When designing your app, make sure you respect the licenses and permissions set by the member. Not respecting these is in violation of our Community Guidelines, and the fastest way to get in trouble with the copyright owner, which is the photographer, not Flickr.

Community Guidelines

Honor thy Community Guidelines. In particular:

"Do link back to Flickr when you post your Flickr content elsewhere." Flickr members deserve credit for the content they create, including the useful information around their photo (such as licenses, tags, and geo location). All of this data is maintained on the photo page on Flickr, so when you post a photo elsewhere, you must link back to the original photo page on Flickr (in other words, don't link to urls that look like this "http://farmX.static.flickr.com...", always link to full photo pages such as "http://flickr.com/photos/X").
"Flickr accounts are intended for personal use." Flickr is designed for people who take photos, and we are doing our darnedest to respect their privacy and licensing wishes. Each account is to be associated with a single member, and if you want to collaborate with others on collecting some photos together, this is what groups on Flickr are for. In other words, members can collaborate within Flickr groups on pooling together photos instead of within a single account.
"Don't use Flickr for commercial purposes." Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we can terminate your account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr technologies (including the API, FlickrMail, etc), or Flickr accounts must be reviewed and approved by Flickr. If you have other questions or requests about commercial usage on Flickr, please feel free to contact us via the Help links on the bottom of the Flickr pages.

Things You Oughta Know

Licenses: While the default license on Flickr is All Rights Reserved, many members opt to use Creative Commons licenses on their photos instead. Be aware of the license types that you are using. We don't directly represent the photographers nor are we lawyers so we can't advise you on what is and isn't okay. So if you're using a photo with ARR, make sure it's okay with the photographer first. If you're using a photo with a Creative Commons license, make sure you understand what that license means since this is set by the photographer. Here is how we attribute photos, following the CC guidelines.
Membership levels: Flickr supports two membership levels, Free and Pro. Free members can upload up to 200GB of photos and 2 videos a month, and the most recent 200 photos and videos are accessible at any time. Pro members can upload an unlimited amount of photos per month, and all photos become accessible. The people.getUploadStatus API method returns the current upload state (bandwidth data and remaining videos allotted) for Free members. You can use flickr.people.getinfo to find out if a member is "Pro" or not.
New accounts: Only Flickr members can interact with the photos and community on Flickr. You don't need to worry about whether a user is a Flickr member yet or not. During the authorization process, Yahoo! and Flickr handle the checks on whether a user has an account already. If they don't, we'll pass them through an easy signup page, transparently to you, then pass them back with a valid login.
Flickr Logo: Using the Flickr API does not include the Flickr trademark. You cannot use the logo "Flickr" or the Flickr dots. For more information, please look in the Business section of these Guidelines.
Privacy: A user has several options for setting privacy on their photos, as well as correlating settings for each contact on Flickr. You must honor each user's default setting, which is available via the flickr.prefs.getPrivacy method (and in our API TOU).
- Public: photo can be viewed by anyone, and it may also be included in Flickr search results as well as other public areas on Flickr.
- Friends and/or Family: a user can set their relationship with any contact, and depending on that relationship, the contact can see photos set to the same type.
- Private: no one can view the photo except the owner, users that have guest passes to that image/set/collection, people tagged in your photo, and those in whatever groups to which it's added.

Attribution: This is up to the rightful owner of the images to decide, which on Flickr means the photographer. While we cannot represent the photographer's preference for how to attribute their photos, we do recommend checking the copyright law for how to attribute properly, which generally could include displaying the photographer's name and link to the photo's page on Flickr. Flickr supports Creative Commons licenses which have a great overview of proper attribution for those licenses.
Deletions: Photos can be removed from Flickr at any time, generally by the photographer who may choose to delete it or change the privacy permissions, and sometimes by us if it violates a copyright or our guidelines. This is why you should not cache for longer than 24 hours, because the photo may have been removed, and the removal must be complete within 24 hours.
Language: Flickr is available in Chinese, German, English, Spanish, French, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. All functionality on our site is translated, so a user in any country can flip around the languages. In terms of what default language we show first, here's a code.flickr.com blog post that describes what we do.
Abuse: If you or one of your users sees something inappropriate on Flickr, please let us know via the "Report Abuse" button on the bottom of the relevant Flickr webpage (another reason why you should link through to the Flickr photo page for all images).