Flickr is an image-hosting site that allows its users to upload and share with their friends and the world at large their favorite photo albums.

Flickr offers two types of accounts, Free and Pro. The free accounts don’t allow the option of downloading the image files, and only the most 200 recent photos are indexed in the account’s homepage. Free accounts are also subject to deletion after a period of 90 days of inactivity. Once upgraded to the Pro plan, users gain the ability to download the files for previously uploaded images, and they are no longer subject to the inactivity deletion rules.

Flickr was initially launched in February 2004 by Stewart Butterfield with his then-wife Caterina Fake. The site was acquired by Yahoo! in March 2005 (the reported acquisition cost was $35 million). On 16 June 2007, Yahoo! Photos issued a press release stating that its service would end on September 2007, in order to focus the company’s efforts on Flickr.

In 2008, Stewart and Caterina resigned their Yahoo jobs. At the end of November 2010, Yahoo was on the verge of a major layoff affecting 10%-20% of its workforce and Flickr was specifically named as a target for these layoffs. In August 2011 Flickr reported that it continues to see strong adoption for the service; it stated that the site hosts more than 6 billion images and that this number continues to grow steadily.