Last July, we announced an exclusive partnership between Flickr and Getty Images to form The Flickr Collection on gettyimages.com and offer a new kind of creative imagery collection for licensing. Today, we’re ready to debut the collection to the world.

First and foremost, we want to say congratulations to our members — this is truly a testament to their great work. Our community of more than 35 million members from all over the globe continue to amaze us with the authentic and individualistic images that they see in their daily lives and share on Flickr.

For the past few months, editors at Getty Images have been busy exploring the Flickrverse to find the right photos to be part of the collection – a task that is somewhat daunting when there are more than three billion images to choose from on Flickr. The goal was to choose photos that created a commercially viable collection, while preserving the inspirational and unexpected nature of the kinds of images that are so prevalent on Flickr. Like Flickr itself, this is a “living collection” and Getty Images will continue to add thousands of new images every month from here on out.

We see this as an exciting moment that’s breaking new ground for our members around the world, as well as the larger imagery industry. So what are you waiting for — start exploring the first set of photos on gettyimages.com/flickr.

Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager

Photos courtesy of Flickr Collection/Getty Images

Last year, we introduced video to the Flickr community, allowing Pro members to upload 90-second video clips or, “long photos” as we (and others) like to say. Since then, our Pro community has helped define what video on Flickr looks like. It’s authentic and personal –- and it’s like nothing else on the web.

Today we have some exciting enhancements related to video on Flickr to announce:

• Video for All Members: We want to see what the rest of the community has to share, so we are extending the ability to upload video to all of our members. Free members can upload two videos per month, in addition to the 100MB monthly photo upload limit that’s already in place. Video, like photos, is quickly moving beyond a means to simply preserve memories and into a social activity that allows people to communicate and connect. As more devices have the ability to capture both, we’re seeing Flickr members capture videos along with photos to share their view of the world.
• Flickr in HD: Another trend that we’ve noticed is the growing appetite for higher-quality video. With the recent introduction of Nikon’s D90, Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II, Flip Mino HD, and others, it’s even easier to shoot videos in HD. Because our focus has always been on allowing our members to showcase their vision in the best way possible, we’re also enabling HD video uploading and viewing today. Only Pro members can upload videos in HD, but our entire community will benefit by being able to view high quality videos.
• Flickr Clock: All of us at Flickr love creative ways of exploring and visualizing imagery, and Flickr Clock is a new way that we want to celebrate and showcase the amazing video across the Flickrverse. Through Flickr Clock, members will be able to share their vision of what’s happening at any given minute around the world. We’ll be able to display these videos according to the approximate time that they were taken, so you can see what’s happening at different moments in time. Please help us build it into something truly unique and upload your best videos here.

It’s been truly amazing to see how creative our members can get using this medium – check out some of my favorite groups: My Day Yesterday, Timelapse Videos and Video! Video! Video!

And as with the rest of Flickr, we are continuing to evolve the video experience to make it more compelling, accessible and easy to use. So grab your cameras, and capture and share “long photos” of your own!

Here’s an HD demo from a fellow Flickrite’s commute to work:

Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager

Ask anyone on the street if they have photos in their wallet and you might find a handful. But on their phone? That’s another story. Over the last year, our team at Flickr has seen a more than 50% increase in the number of people who have accessed our mobile site. And it can’t go anywhere but up from here.

That’s why we’re rolling out a radically overhauled m.flickr.com site today. What we’re most excited about is that now –- for the first time -– you’ll actually be able to play Flickr videos back on your phone. Ever since we launched video, we’ve let you upload your “long photos” directly from your cell, but we think the playback functionality is pretty huge. It’s based on the Yahoo! Video Platform and takes advantage of its ability to serve content to a wide variety of phones, screen sizes, and video/audio codecs. We’ll be rolling video playback out over the coming weeks for handsets that support streaming video, starting with the iPhone and iPod Touch today and more to come.

The new m.flickr.com sports a sleek new interface that makes it significantly easier to view your photostream and sets, and puts recent activity (yours and your contacts’) front and center. We’ve also added a bunch of new capabilities, like letting you add contacts, favorite images, and change your privacy and permission settings –- all while you’re out walking the dog. And, in support of our “eyes of the world” vision, we’ve also added the ability to explore the latest “interestingness” photos.

iPhone users have been playing with our new mobile incarnation since we released our beta in October and now we’re expanding the experience to any smart phone that supports browsers like Webkit, Firefox Mobile, and Opera Mobile.

The mobile phone has become central to how many of our users take pictures and how they share their view of the world with the important people in their life. We think the new Flickr mobile experience reflects all the cool possibilities that today’s advanced and rich mobile web has to offer, combined with all the functionality Flickr members know and love.

So grab your phone, bookmark m.fllickr.com, and enjoy photos and videos with a big smile on that small screen.

UPDATE: Just a clarification. Video playback is available for videos uploaded yesterday onward. Over the next few months, we’ll work to make the entire catalog of videos viewable on our mobile site.

Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager

We’re very excited to announce that Flickr now supports video!

Yes, those videos you’ve been accumulating on your hard drive or cell phone finally have a great place to hang out, meet other videos, and be loved.

Adding the ability to share videos on Flickr is a natural extension of our mission to be the “eyes of the world” — letting our members share what they see with the people who matter most to them, be they family and friends, or the world. As we set about adding video to one of the world’s most loved photo sharing experiences (Flickr has over 25 million members worldwide who have collectively uploaded over 2 billion photos), we did a lot of homework. We spoke to our members, took surveys, played with very many video experiences on the web, and, of course, took lots of video. Through the process, we learned a few surprising things:

• Most videos being captured today are essentially “long photos” — short clips that are captured on digital still cameras or mobile phones rather than long format video taken by traditional video cameras
• People aren’t sharing these clips much. If they are, it’s either via playback on their camera, DVD, or sending a large email file.
• While certainly there is video being shared on the web, most of it is re-broadcast content, such as clips from TV shows. If it’s user recorded content, much of it is material that is trying to be like broadcast content.

The video equivalent for the personal, authentic moments that are the hallmark of photos found on Flickr is actually pretty tough to find.

Until now. Check out some of the great videos shared by members of our Beta program:

So here’s how it works. If you’re a pro member, you can go to Flickr and start uploading your videos now. Video on Flickr works the same way as photos. Features you know and love like easy uploading, tagging, sets, sharing, privacy settings, adding to groups, geo-tagging, interestingness, and stats all work for video just as they do for photos. We support videos that are up to 90 seconds long each and up to 150MB large. Your unlimited storage limits still apply — so go ahead, push that to the limit.

Why 90 seconds?
Most video that people capture is, in actuality, fairly short-format content captured on digital still cameras. Our research suggests that most of it is actually under 60 seconds, and 90 seconds should be a pretty comfortable limit. As with (most) other features on the site, we’d love to hear feedback.

Why pro only?
Pro members are the most active, dedicated members of the Flickr community and are the foundation to all we do at Flickr. Starting with them seemed like the right way to introduce such a significant new feature to the site.

So what are you waiting for? Free your videos — share them on Flickr.

Kakul Srivastava
General Manager, Flickr

Every photo has a location – it was taken somewhere. Unfortunately, there haven’t been very many great tools to allow browsing of photos by location. At Flickr, we take this challenge pretty seriously and have been working hard to figure out the best way to allow our visitors to see the world through the prism of the incredible, incredible photography on Flickr.

To that end, we’re completely making over Flickr’s map explorer and preparing to introduce a new Places Pages feature. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, is giving a preview of these great new additions at the Web 2.0 Summit, so check it out if you can.

The new Flickr map will display tags that will hover over specific locations, representing interesting and newsworthy things going on there. Clicking on any tag will take you to a photo stream of the popular and current photos related to that topic in that location. This is a great way to browse through news and events on a global basis – a forest fire here, a folk festival there, and fireworks in that other place. It’s like getting a pulse on the world by listening to a million camera shutters snapping pictures in unison.

Helping visitors discover photos by location is key to Flickr’s vision of being “the eyes of the world.” Our new Places Pages will provide a zoomed-in way to explore virtually any place in the world through iconic photos, popular tags, relevant Flickr groups, featured photographers of that region, along with local information such as a detailed map, current time, and temperature. What’s really cool about these pages though is that they are literally built by our members. Each photo, photographer, or group featured on any Places Page will be included because our members found them interesting as an aggregate group. There’s a lot of math to keep the content fresh, relevant, and awe-inspiring, but the end result is just stunning.

The new map and Places Pages are not yet available. We’re putting some finishing touches on them in the coming weeks. Keep an eye on the Flickr blog for the official launch.

We want to thank our 15 million members for making Flickr so fabulous and for sharing their amazing images with the world. With these new features, we invite you all to explore the world through the eyes of Flickr members – it’s truly a humbling experience.

UPDATE: Both new features are now live!

Kakul Srivastava
Director of Product Management, Flickr