Flicker

            
Flicker (pronounced “flicker”) is an image hosting and video hosting website, and web services suite that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! In2005.

In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, and effectively an online community, the services is widely used by photo researchers and by embed in blogs and social media.
 Flicker was launched in February 2004 by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company founded by Stewart Butterfield and Catherina Fake. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp’s Game Never-ending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game.

In August 2011 the site reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images and this number continues to grow steadily according to reporting sources. Photos and videos can be accessed from Flicker without the need to register an account but an account must be made in order to upload content onto the website. For mobile users, Flicker has official mobile apps for iOS, Android, Play Station Vita, and Windows Phone operating systems.
Flicker currently offers three types of accounts; Free, Ad Free and Doublers. The free option includes one terabyte of storage limited to 200 MB per video. The Ad Free option allows subscribers to avoid advertisements for an annual free. As the name suggests, the Doublers account includes two terabytes of storage.

Groups can be started by any member of Flicker. The creator of the Flicker group has the ability to monitor and set restrictions for the group. Groups are used as a way to communicate with fellow members of Flicker around common photography interests.

Organizer is a web application for organizing photos within a Flicker account that can be accessed through the Flicker interface. It allows users to modify tags, descriptions, and set groupings, and to place photos on a world map (a feature provided in conjunction with Yahoo! Maps).

Flicker had a partnership with the Picnic online photo-editing application that included a reduced- feature version of Picnic built into Flicker as a default photo editor.

Flicker provides both private and public image storage. A user uploading an image can set privacy controls that determine who can view the image. A photo can be flagged as either public or private.  Private images are visible by default only to the up loader, but they can also be marked as viewable by friends and/or family.
In May 2011, Flicker added an option to easily reverse an account termination. This action was motivated by a very public accidental deletion of a Flicker user’s account, and its protracted restoration.

According to the company, as of August 2009 Flicker is hosted on 62 databases across 124 servers, with about 800,000 user accounts per pair of servers.