The Internet Archive book images Flickr account has been deleted
flickr.com
flickr.com
It was probably one of my favourite things on the internet, no hyperbole. You could search for words and you would get all sorts of strange illustrations/block prints/photos that may or may not have something to do with the term. The fact that the illustrations were taken out of context made them even more fascinating and mysterious.
And now it's gone..
All the time people had spent delving the depths of the archive of 5+ million images and curating the most interesting images, just gone?
I really really hope that some backup of the metadata was done before the delete button was pushed.. but I fear the worst. From the sounds of it the account was voluntarily deleted by IA. I find it hard to believe that they of all people would just nuke that information?
What makes it all the more painful is I'd actually done a full scrape of all the metadata that Flickr makes available through its API, but I can't seem to find the data from the scrape that I did that included the all important view counts..
http://web.archive.org/web/20220308103246/https://www.flickr...
Perhaps some folks over at /r/DataHoarder [0] might have something?
Might want to start with their sister sub /r/DHExchange [1] depending on how the main mods would view this situation.
I've been trying to drum up some awareness/support on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nightgolfer/status/1509116982611759107
The full scrape you did — is it something you can share? I'm wondering if there's some way to use it to... idunno, do something. Worst case, maybe it could be used to create a search engine that could find the metadata for a given URL of an image that was on the account.
If we can't get Flickr to undo this, I'm trying to think of other places that might be able to host the data (would need the images, too, though), and already have the necessary software for an image collection that big. Thoughts?
At least from my perspective, this thoughtless act has decimated the usefulness of the Archive book collection, because all my interaction with it was through the images inside the books.
Mind-blowing and utterly devastating =,(
> 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.
You could also download the books using the list on my website and extract all of the images with these instructions: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Extracting_imag...