Flickr.org Fund for Digital Archives

Empowering cultural organizations to describe and share photography collections with the world.

The Flickr.org Fund for Digital Archives is unlocking a bottleneck in cultural preservation: the challenge of describing digitized photography collections. This fund supports projects that experiment with generating baseline image descriptions—clearly marked as AI-generated—as a starting point for public engagement, education, and discovery. Our goal is to expand access to cultural heritage by helping communities publish more photography, more meaningfully, to Flickr.com.

Eligibility

This fund supports projects led by cultural organizations that aim to publish digitized photographs with baseline descriptions. Priority is given to small institutions experimenting with metadata generation for accessibility and engagement on Flickr.com. To qualify for this match fund, projects must meet the following eligibility requirements:
- Digitize photography collections into accessible digital formats.
- Use AI or automated tools to generate baseline image descriptions, clearly labeled as machine-generated.
- Publish collections on Flickr.com, with strong preference for joining the Flickr Commons program.
- Include descriptive metadata to enhance searchability, education, and public use.
- Propose strategies to engage audiences with the collection, such as through annotation, tagging, or storytelling.
- Provide a clear plan for how the project will use Flickr.com to increase accessibility, visibility, and long-term cultural value.
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Together, let’s open up the world’s photography archives for richer discovery and deeper public connection.