Fotopedia closes, but CC-licensed photos live on

Ho Chi Minh City
Trung Dangy / CC BY-NC-SA

If you’re a fan of photo-and-knowledge-sharing community Fotopedia, you’ve likely heard that the site is closing this Sunday, August 10. When Creative Commons heard the news, we contacted Fotopedia to ask if there were some way that we could help save all of the Creative Commons–licensed photos on the site. Now, we’re working together with the staff at Fotopedia to create a new archive of all of that content. At the same time, our friends at Archive Team are creating a copy of the entire Fotopedia website.

Here at CC, we’ve been big fans of Fotopedia for a long time. The site elegantly mixes together content from Flickr, Wikipedia, and other sources in a way that’s only possible thanks to CC licenses. And over the years, Fotopedia developed an amazing community of people curating all of that content into highly entertaining, visually rich albums.

It’s fitting that all of that work will live on in the new archive. Fotopedia has always been a great example of the power of the decentralized web. Just like Fotopedia brought new life to great photos from Flickr, the archive will bring new life to great photos from Fotopedia.

If you’d like to know when the archive is open, subscribe to our mailing list.. If you have any questions, email us at info@creativecommons.org.

Creative Commons salutes Fotopedia for its work as a leader in online content-sharing. We wish Jean-Marie Hullot and his team all the best on their future projects.

6 thoughts on “Fotopedia closes, but CC-licensed photos live on”

  1. I have asked Fotonauts team how we can check whether our photos published on Fotopedia are licensed under Creative Commons or not, an how to eventually change the license to Creative Commons, if there is still time before Fotopedia shuts down.

    They may be busy at this time: do you have any idea regarding this?

    I think active publishers will be happy to know that their Fotopedia pictures get a second life this way, until Fotopedia eventually resurrects.

    Best regards,

  2. i found fotopedia with the help of this post, it have very beautiful collections but i think i found it in last minutes…

  3. The Internet Archive has agreed to host the complete dump of all public fotopedia pages and images. Please donate to the Internet Archive! This is not a small task, and it’s not the only set of user-generated content they’re saving right now. Thank you!

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