8 ms·

The Internet Archive Book Images has deleted their Flickr account

186 points by danso 5y ago

danso 5y ago
Flickr support thread with rationale: https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/72157720510495566 https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/72157720510495566
- blakesterz 5y ago
  Flickr says "The Internet Archive Book Images recently deleted their Flickr account. Flickr and Internet Archive were in agreement on this because..." so from the sounds of that, Flickr didn't delete it, they both agreed it wasn't what they wanted?
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Interesting. I hope there is not a general policy of discouraging documents on Flickr because a Flickr album I personal refer to often consists entirely of scanned maps and papers. https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/albums/72157622518464203 https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/albums/7215762251846...
  - testplzignore 5y ago
    It sounds like the Internet Archive deleted it without consulting with all (or any?) of the people who built and use it. Would be nice if they made a statement to clarify the situation.
    - Ansil849 5y ago
      > It sounds like the Internet Archive deleted it without consulting with all (or any?) of the people who built and use it. Yup, that is exactly what it sounds like. I learned this lesson many years ago, and this is why I no longer devote any significant amount of my time contributing to projects which someone else has the power to pull the plug on.
  - r_singh 5y ago
    I’m not sure but considering that SmugMug bought Flickr some time back… Maybe they sent the IA a bill? And in response to that the IA “deleted their account”…
    - onethumb 5y ago
      Nope, we didn't send IA a bill. :)
      - r_singh 5y ago
        Thanks for letting me know :)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    Then, weirdly: > "The @internetarchive did not ask to take these off of Flickr's site. We do not have any power of them-- it is up to them." —https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/151100996579578675 https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/151100996579578675... IA and Flickrs pent weeks talking about this (according to flickr...), but didn't come to enough understanding that they both agree on what happened? I'm also curious what happened with the title of this HN post. It currently says "The Internet Archive Book Images has deleted their Flickr account", but apparently originally said something else? Shouldn't the HN post title match the tweet linked, regardless? Under what HN policy do mods change the title to not match what it's linking to?
    - webmaven 5y ago
      Now that tweet has been deleted.
      - jrochkind1 5y ago
        I think I just accidentally corrupted it in my post. let's try again: https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/1511009965795786754 https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/151100996579578675...
    - johtso 5y ago
      The account is being reinstated! https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594 https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594 "Recommending to IA that they delete it was a mistake. Our problem was that the 5M book images were drowning out the rest of the Commons members. So, we are restoring the account, moving it out of the Commons, and placing the book images under CC0, with IA’s permission and support"
detaro 5y ago
previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30796136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30796136
martin_a 5y ago
Love the reasoning: > The Internet Archive Book Images recently deleted their Flickr account. > Flickr and Internet Archive were in agreement on this because: > (1) The account was largely comprised of scans of book images, not photos. > (2) The account was no longer being actively managed by Internet Archive. > (3) The book images tended to show up in irrelevant search results of Flickr Commons photography. While one can argue that scans != photos, 2 and 3 sound like lame excuses.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > While one can argue that scans != photos, 2 and 3 sound like lame excuses. How so? My take: Dead accounts of not-photos don't seem great for Flickr or its users.
  - martin_a 5y ago
    Why not conserve it? From the forum posting it seems like lots of users enjoyed those images, collected and organized them and whatnot. I see a use for them, but it's obviously not as "shiny" as flickr would like its content to be, probably.
    - CharlesW 5y ago
      > Why not conserve it? FWIW, the 5 million book illustrations are still on Internet Archive somewhere (the key being "somewhere"). The loss of the metadata and organization is still a shame, of course. IA is a miracle, but can be intimidating compared to Flickr.
    - EarlKing 5y ago
      Because that's not their job? From their perspective it's quite literally spamming up their index and impeding the intended use of the commons. Those images and all associated metadata should have been relocated to archive.org years ago. Instead it appears IA just nuked it outright without consulting anybody to see if any of it was backed up anywhere. The problem here isn't with Flickr, but the clear lack of professionalism on the part of IA in misusing others' resources and then pitching a fit when called out on it.
udia 5y ago
I am surprised that the Internet Archive does not fully control the storage of their assets, or at least have some kind of contractual agreement with Flickr to prevent this from occurring.
- gowld 5y ago
  > I am surprised that the Internet Archive does not fully control the storage of their assets, > or at least have some kind of contractual agreement with Flickr to prevent this from occurring. None of this is relevant. IA deleted their account because it wasn't a fit for Flickr. It was a mutually consensual separation.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    A mutually consensual separation that they are now both claiming was the other one's choice, not theirs. Yeah, ok, I actually believe that.
- nightpool 5y ago
  To be clear: the actual scans are fine, what is removed was the ability to browse and search for these images on Flickr, with metadata & tags added by users, rather then having to manually download thousands of photos on IA, without any web-based search or preview. The linked article goes into this: https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2022/04/5-million-book-illustrations-deleted-from-flickr https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2022/04/5-million-book-i... But for all the greatness of Internet Archive (and it is truly great!) it doesn’t have the user-interface for images that Flickr has, the ability to save to galleries, add tags, and effectively search. That’s why it was such a marriage made in heaven. As far as we are aware, with the IA Book Images account gone, there is now no way to search for individual images from the hundreds of thousands of books at Internet Archive
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The Internet Archive Book Images recently deleted their Flickr account. Flickr and Internet Archive were in agreement on this because… If the support thread is to be believed, Internet Archive was part of the decision process and agreed on this outcome. The wording makes it sound like the Internet Archive deleted the account, not Flickr. Doesn’t really look like pitchforks are warranted
- johtso 5y ago
  From what we know deletion of account was mutually agreed between Flickr and IA.. and was carried out with no consultation or prior warning, and no consideration for all the lost metadata. Edit: To clarify, the internet archive did not consult or warn the users of the collection. There's currently an open letter to IA and Flickr for people to sign to try and call on them to find a better resolution: https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-flickr-and-internet-archive-to-save-collection-of-52-million-book-image-scans-72496902 https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-flickr-and-internet-...
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    EDIT: Original title of this submission claimed that Flickr deleted the account, not that Internet Archive deleted their own account. My comment below is in the context of that claim. Do you have a reputable source for this from the Internet Archive (not speculation)? It literally says that the Internet Archive deleted their account, not Flickr. Unless the support thread is wrong, I don’t see how your claim about no consultation and no warning is consistent.
    - johtso 5y ago
      By no consultation or warning I mean that the Internet Archive did not consult users of the resource or give any warning that they would be deleting it. https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157720510495566/#reply72157720510889176 https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157720510495566/#r... "The Internet Archive Book Images recently deleted their Flickr account. >Flickr and Internet Archive were in agreement on this< because:" https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157720510495566/#reply72157720592940520 https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157720510495566/#r... "Hey, all. We're sorry for what seems like a sudden removal of the Internet Archive account. This decision came after weeks of conversation and coordination with the Internet Archive."
johtso 5y ago
rasengan 5y ago
Insiders are hinting at censorship.
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  no they aren't.
  - rasengan 5y ago
    Unfortunately, you're wrong.
    - JohnHaugeland 5y ago
      I see that you believe that no-evidence claims are valuable.
      - textfiles 5y ago
        If this was censorship, it was the weirdest censorship ever.
        eezurr 5y ago
        hey there, completely off topic but was this collection bigger in the past? https://archive.org/details/myspace_thesis?tab=collection https://archive.org/details/myspace_thesis?tab=collection edit: im silly, didnt realize you grouped them together
ineedasername 5y ago
I'm surprised IA relies on outside, potentially ephemeral services at all. I thought all of their material was self-hosted. Had that actually been true, it seems like IA wouldn't have needed to delete its account over an issue of whether their usage fit the intended use case for Flickr.
- rolph 5y ago
  this is why archives should be independently duplicated, to head off a massacre. what isnt clear to me is the survival of the content, was there a data migration or was it all just nerfed?
  - johtso 5y ago
    All the images still exist on the internet archive, just not in a format that can be explored. What's been lost is the efforts of all the users to separate the interesting images from the chaff.. and organise them into collections. For such a large corpus that's a really valuable thing. Also links people had to those images are just dead. And all the images users had previously favourited have just disappeared from their collections.
    - rolph 5y ago
      what a task it would be, to reconstruct the relations and cobble up a db from user data.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    >this is why archives should be independently duplicated It's an interesting challenge with IA because they have > 100 petabytes of content, many thousands of $ in hard drives alone. Too much for random individuals to decide they want to host their own clone & become a mirror. So, we're be looking at large institutions or companies to do this philanthropically. Or, here's the tech challenge, some distributed mechanism where participants all host a portion, with enough redundancy that a large % could go offline and still keep integrity.
- 5y ago
thi2 5y ago
Thats devastating. I actually have the mentioned Biodiversity Heritage Library account bookmarked and visit it from time to time, I really hope it remains unaffected.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pronoiac 5y ago
Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive tweeted: > The @internetarchive did not ask to take these off of Flickr's site. We do not have any power of them-- it is up to them. > The Images are still in the books that are hosted on Archive.org > But I understand Flickr is interested in putting them back up. https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/1511009965795786754 https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/151100996579578675...
- johtso 5y ago
  And Don MacAskill of Flickr tweets: "To be clear, Flickr didn't delete this. Our friends at the Internet Archive did. It's their account. I don't know all the details, but I believe we've been collaborating with IA on ways to improve the Commons, and I think removing the Books account was part of that effort." https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511018079802720256 https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511018079802720256 Clearly there's some misunderstanding/communication.
tedd4u 5y ago
@DonMacAskill - Smugmug/Flickr CEO "Recommending to IA that they delete it was a mistake. Our problem was that the 5M book images were drowning out the rest of the Commons members. So, we are restoring the account, moving it out of the Commons, and placing the book images under CC0, with IA’s permission and support" [1] [1] https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594 https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
textfiles 5y ago
All the images are returning. https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594 https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594
textfiles 5y ago
The Book Images collection on Flickr has now returned.

186 points by danso 5y ago

Flickr support thread with rationale: https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/72157720510495566 https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/72157720510495566

blakesterz 5y ago
Flickr says "The Internet Archive Book Images recently deleted their Flickr account. Flickr and Internet Archive were in agreement on this because..." so from the sounds of that, Flickr didn't delete it, they both agreed it wasn't what they wanted?
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Interesting. I hope there is not a general policy of discouraging documents on Flickr because a Flickr album I personal refer to often consists entirely of scanned maps and papers. https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/albums/72157622518464203 https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/albums/7215762251846...
- testplzignore 5y ago
  It sounds like the Internet Archive deleted it without consulting with all (or any?) of the people who built and use it. Would be nice if they made a statement to clarify the situation.
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    > It sounds like the Internet Archive deleted it without consulting with all (or any?) of the people who built and use it. Yup, that is exactly what it sounds like. I learned this lesson many years ago, and this is why I no longer devote any significant amount of my time contributing to projects which someone else has the power to pull the plug on.
- r_singh 5y ago
  I’m not sure but considering that SmugMug bought Flickr some time back… Maybe they sent the IA a bill? And in response to that the IA “deleted their account”…
  - onethumb 5y ago
    Nope, we didn't send IA a bill. :)
    - r_singh 5y ago
      Thanks for letting me know :)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Then, weirdly: > "The @internetarchive did not ask to take these off of Flickr's site. We do not have any power of them-- it is up to them." —https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/151100996579578675 https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/151100996579578675... IA and Flickrs pent weeks talking about this (according to flickr...), but didn't come to enough understanding that they both agree on what happened? I'm also curious what happened with the title of this HN post. It currently says "The Internet Archive Book Images has deleted their Flickr account", but apparently originally said something else? Shouldn't the HN post title match the tweet linked, regardless? Under what HN policy do mods change the title to not match what it's linking to?
  - webmaven 5y ago
    Now that tweet has been deleted.
    - jrochkind1 5y ago
      I think I just accidentally corrupted it in my post. let's try again: https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/1511009965795786754 https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/151100996579578675...
  - johtso 5y ago
    The account is being reinstated! https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594 https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594 "Recommending to IA that they delete it was a mistake. Our problem was that the 5M book images were drowning out the rest of the Commons members. So, we are restoring the account, moving it out of the Commons, and placing the book images under CC0, with IA’s permission and support"

detaro 5y ago

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30796136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30796136

martin_a 5y ago

Love the reasoning: > The Internet Archive Book Images recently deleted their Flickr account. > Flickr and Internet Archive were in agreement on this because: > (1) The account was largely comprised of scans of book images, not photos. > (2) The account was no longer being actively managed by Internet Archive. > (3) The book images tended to show up in irrelevant search results of Flickr Commons photography. While one can argue that scans != photos, 2 and 3 sound like lame excuses.

CharlesW 5y ago
> While one can argue that scans != photos, 2 and 3 sound like lame excuses. How so? My take: Dead accounts of not-photos don't seem great for Flickr or its users.
- martin_a 5y ago
  Why not conserve it? From the forum posting it seems like lots of users enjoyed those images, collected and organized them and whatnot. I see a use for them, but it's obviously not as "shiny" as flickr would like its content to be, probably.
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    > Why not conserve it? FWIW, the 5 million book illustrations are still on Internet Archive somewhere (the key being "somewhere"). The loss of the metadata and organization is still a shame, of course. IA is a miracle, but can be intimidating compared to Flickr.
  - EarlKing 5y ago
    Because that's not their job? From their perspective it's quite literally spamming up their index and impeding the intended use of the commons. Those images and all associated metadata should have been relocated to archive.org years ago. Instead it appears IA just nuked it outright without consulting anybody to see if any of it was backed up anywhere. The problem here isn't with Flickr, but the clear lack of professionalism on the part of IA in misusing others' resources and then pitching a fit when called out on it.

udia 5y ago

I am surprised that the Internet Archive does not fully control the storage of their assets, or at least have some kind of contractual agreement with Flickr to prevent this from occurring.

gowld 5y ago
> I am surprised that the Internet Archive does not fully control the storage of their assets, > or at least have some kind of contractual agreement with Flickr to prevent this from occurring. None of this is relevant. IA deleted their account because it wasn't a fit for Flickr. It was a mutually consensual separation.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  A mutually consensual separation that they are now both claiming was the other one's choice, not theirs. Yeah, ok, I actually believe that.
nightpool 5y ago
To be clear: the actual scans are fine, what is removed was the ability to browse and search for these images on Flickr, with metadata & tags added by users, rather then having to manually download thousands of photos on IA, without any web-based search or preview. The linked article goes into this: https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2022/04/5-million-book-illustrations-deleted-from-flickr https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2022/04/5-million-book-i... But for all the greatness of Internet Archive (and it is truly great!) it doesn’t have the user-interface for images that Flickr has, the ability to save to galleries, add tags, and effectively search. That’s why it was such a marriage made in heaven. As far as we are aware, with the IA Book Images account gone, there is now no way to search for individual images from the hundreds of thousands of books at Internet Archive

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> The Internet Archive Book Images recently deleted their Flickr account. Flickr and Internet Archive were in agreement on this because… If the support thread is to be believed, Internet Archive was part of the decision process and agreed on this outcome. The wording makes it sound like the Internet Archive deleted the account, not Flickr. Doesn’t really look like pitchforks are warranted

johtso 5y ago
From what we know deletion of account was mutually agreed between Flickr and IA.. and was carried out with no consultation or prior warning, and no consideration for all the lost metadata. Edit: To clarify, the internet archive did not consult or warn the users of the collection. There's currently an open letter to IA and Flickr for people to sign to try and call on them to find a better resolution: https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-flickr-and-internet-archive-to-save-collection-of-52-million-book-image-scans-72496902 https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-flickr-and-internet-...
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  EDIT: Original title of this submission claimed that Flickr deleted the account, not that Internet Archive deleted their own account. My comment below is in the context of that claim. Do you have a reputable source for this from the Internet Archive (not speculation)? It literally says that the Internet Archive deleted their account, not Flickr. Unless the support thread is wrong, I don’t see how your claim about no consultation and no warning is consistent.
  - johtso 5y ago
    By no consultation or warning I mean that the Internet Archive did not consult users of the resource or give any warning that they would be deleting it. https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157720510495566/#reply72157720510889176 https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157720510495566/#r... "The Internet Archive Book Images recently deleted their Flickr account. >Flickr and Internet Archive were in agreement on this< because:" https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157720510495566/#reply72157720592940520 https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157720510495566/#r... "Hey, all. We're sorry for what seems like a sudden removal of the Internet Archive account. This decision came after weeks of conversation and coordination with the Internet Archive."

johtso 5y ago

rasengan 5y ago

Insiders are hinting at censorship.

JohnHaugeland 5y ago
no they aren't.
- rasengan 5y ago
  Unfortunately, you're wrong.
  - JohnHaugeland 5y ago
    I see that you believe that no-evidence claims are valuable.
    - textfiles 5y ago
      If this was censorship, it was the weirdest censorship ever.
      - eezurr 5y ago
        hey there, completely off topic but was this collection bigger in the past? https://archive.org/details/myspace_thesis?tab=collection https://archive.org/details/myspace_thesis?tab=collection edit: im silly, didnt realize you grouped them together

ineedasername 5y ago

I'm surprised IA relies on outside, potentially ephemeral services at all. I thought all of their material was self-hosted. Had that actually been true, it seems like IA wouldn't have needed to delete its account over an issue of whether their usage fit the intended use case for Flickr.

rolph 5y ago
this is why archives should be independently duplicated, to head off a massacre. what isnt clear to me is the survival of the content, was there a data migration or was it all just nerfed?
- johtso 5y ago
  All the images still exist on the internet archive, just not in a format that can be explored. What's been lost is the efforts of all the users to separate the interesting images from the chaff.. and organise them into collections. For such a large corpus that's a really valuable thing. Also links people had to those images are just dead. And all the images users had previously favourited have just disappeared from their collections.
  - rolph 5y ago
    what a task it would be, to reconstruct the relations and cobble up a db from user data.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  >this is why archives should be independently duplicated It's an interesting challenge with IA because they have > 100 petabytes of content, many thousands of $ in hard drives alone. Too much for random individuals to decide they want to host their own clone & become a mirror. So, we're be looking at large institutions or companies to do this philanthropically. Or, here's the tech challenge, some distributed mechanism where participants all host a portion, with enough redundancy that a large % could go offline and still keep integrity.
5y ago

thi2 5y ago

Thats devastating. I actually have the mentioned Biodiversity Heritage Library account bookmarked and visit it from time to time, I really hope it remains unaffected.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pronoiac 5y ago

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive tweeted: > The @internetarchive did not ask to take these off of Flickr's site. We do not have any power of them-- it is up to them. > The Images are still in the books that are hosted on Archive.org > But I understand Flickr is interested in putting them back up. https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/1511009965795786754 https://twitter.com/brewster_kahle/status/151100996579578675...

johtso 5y ago
And Don MacAskill of Flickr tweets: "To be clear, Flickr didn't delete this. Our friends at the Internet Archive did. It's their account. I don't know all the details, but I believe we've been collaborating with IA on ways to improve the Commons, and I think removing the Books account was part of that effort." https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511018079802720256 https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511018079802720256 Clearly there's some misunderstanding/communication.

tedd4u 5y ago

@DonMacAskill - Smugmug/Flickr CEO "Recommending to IA that they delete it was a mistake. Our problem was that the 5M book images were drowning out the rest of the Commons members. So, we are restoring the account, moving it out of the Commons, and placing the book images under CC0, with IA’s permission and support" [1] [1] https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594 https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

textfiles 5y ago

All the images are returning. https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594 https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511033739706478594

textfiles 5y ago

The Book Images collection on Flickr has now returned.