The Internet Archive Book Images has deleted their Flickr account
twitter.com
twitter.com
https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/albums/7215762251846...
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.
Maybe they sent the IA a bill? And in response to that the IA “deleted their account”…
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?
"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"
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
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-...
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.
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/#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."
For many with lighter copyright you can certainly host them elsewhere as well.
1. All the lost metadata. By making the images available on Flickr users were unearthing the interesting images from the 5 million plus collection and creating all sorts of valuable metadata.
2. There is no way to explore the images as they are stored on IA. At a certain point if the data can't be explored it may as well not be available.
"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
what isnt clear to me is the survival of the content, was there a data migration or was it all just nerfed?
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.
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.
A partnership like this makes quite a bit of sense.
I might build an excellent interface to IA's millions of images, so good that it becomes the default way of viewing them. Countless bookmarks and links from other sites are published against the material through my site. But then one day I decide it's just not working out anymore and I pack it all up. I call this imaginary system Fleckr.
I'm not saying people shouldn't build what they want in this way, but IA shouldn't rely on other services to host anything that it wants to stick around. They appear to have done that with Flickr, because Flickr had a good system, but now it's all dust. Or, if not dust, it will require a complete system to be built to do something similar, migrating user contributions (if they were salvageable) to this new system. I'm saying this new system should be owned & operated by IA. Building it w/ volunteer work under a FOSS license like many other large projects seems a reasonable option.
My guess is that the conversation was initiated by Flickr. Whether IA agreed with them from the beginning or was forced to "agree" probably doesn't matter, especially because I can see the merit of the argument that Flickr may not be an appropriate platform. I'm just hoping things were save in a way that they'll be able to implement a replacement at some point.
> 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.
How so?
My take: Dead accounts of not-photos don't seem great for Flickr or its users.
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.
Even if that's the case, this kind of thing should be handled differently (e.g. keep the account, but do some custom thing to down-rank those images in searches or whatever).
That's not how the OP twitter thread presented it.
Because I think it's bad form to just up and delete data like this, especially something that's about archiving/preservation.
Has the Internet Archive actually made a statement about that? Some Flickr support person claimed they agreed to it in a support thread, but I can imagine a lot of scenarios where there might be an unacceptable amount of spin going on (e.g. Flickr made some unreasonable ultimatum, and IA chose to delete the account instead of accept).
> If this isn't sufficient rationale to delete data, what is?
That the data is truly unwanted.
What's that about? Is this meant to cast doubt on the reliability of the speaker?
> I can imagine a lot of scenarios where there might be an unacceptable amount of spin going on
Ok well, I am going to take Flickr's word as stated until I have reason to believe otherwise, I don't see any reason to speculate on arbitrary alternative scenarios, Flickr doesn't have a history of lying about support issues as far as I am aware.
> That the data is truly unwanted.
There's not really a way to reasonably assess if that's the case besides what the owner of the account communicates.
"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 https://t.co/NHtWm9GEQu
But I understand Flickr is interested in putting them back up."
https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1511018079802720256
"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."
It sounds like maybe their was some discussion between the two organizations, but unless Flickr is blatantly lying I don’t see any reason to believe that the Internet Archive was wronged.
Point is: flickr should have enough space and whatnot to host all those images if it wanted. They decided to remove that content, because "it appears in search"?
Sounds more like it wasn't cool enough so they wanted it gone, found some reasonable reasons and that's it.
> 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/151100996579578675...
"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
Clearly there's some misunderstanding/communication.
> 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.
Yeah, ok, I actually believe that.
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 Archivehttps://archive.org/details/myspace_thesis?tab=collection
edit: im silly, didnt realize you grouped them together