FuckFlickr
FAT Lab's own install, Wayback capture from December 28, 2010. The album thumbnails are FAT Lab members' photos.
FuckFlickr (2007) is open-source image gallery software that won’t narc you out. We made it as an alternative to hosting your photos on a certain Yahoo-owned photo sharing site. It’s a small PHP app with no database: upload it, drop images in the data folder and it builds a gallery with thumbnails.
Created by Theo Watson, me and Greg Leuch at F.A.T. Lab.
Why
Shi Tao is a Chinese journalist who got a 10-year prison sentence in 2005 for “divulging state secrets.” Yahoo helped put him there by giving Chinese authorities information that tied his email account to the message. Big web platforms are responsible for what they do with our data, so we built something you could host yourself.
History
- November 2007: our own install at fffff.at/fuckflickr was already live (Wayback, November 19, 2007).
- February 2008: it hosted a FAT Lab image thread, with “public release coming soon.”
- March 29, 2008: I merged Greg’s
halvfetbranch into trunk and added RSS the same day (commit history). - May 12, 2008: we released FuckFlickr 2.0, a 268kb .zip. Big shoutout to Greg for serious code contributions.
- September 2008: Masters of Media at the University of Amsterdam wrote it up.
- 2009: the code moved to GitHub, with an experimental branch for audio and video. Matt Katz sent a YAML fix that June.
- June 11, 2010: photos from Aram Bartholl’s SPEED SHOW vol. 1 in Berlin went up in a FuckFlickr gallery.
- 2013 to 2014: pull requests kept trickling in, from Steffen Jaeckel and Sam Lehman.
- August 19, 2016: Yahoo sent a notice claiming “trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and unfair competition.” We renamed it PhuckPhlickr on the project page. I’ve restored the original name here.
It was also our everything bucket. Mixtapes, FAT Lab bumpers, Zombie Nation photos and Google Alarm screenshots all lived in a FuckFlickr gallery at some point.
Slide from FAT Lab's PechaKucha Berlin talk by Aram Bartholl and Tobias Leingruber, 2009.
Features
Flat file storage (no database), automatic thumbnails including animated GIFs, themes, RSS feeds, lightbox, sorting, pagination and caching. Titles and descriptions go in a simple YAML file per folder.
An album page with titles, captions and embed codes, Wayback capture from January 7, 2011, with photos posted by FAT Lab members.
Links
- Source code on GitHub
- F.A.T. Lab project page
- Demo gallery (archived)
- Masters of Media writeup (archived)
See also: FAT Lab