The Ins and Outs of the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million Dataset

This past summer we (Yahoo Labs and Flickr) released the YFCC100M dataset that is the largest and most ambitious collection of Flickr photos and videos ever, containing 99,206,564 photos and 793,436 videos from 581,099 different photographers. We’re super excited about the dataset, because it is a reflection of how Flickr and photography have evolved over the past 10 years. And it contains photos and videos of almost everything under the sun (and yes, loads of cats).

We’ve received a lot of emails and tweets asking for more details about the dataset, so in this blog post, we’ll gladly tell you. Each of the 100 million photos and videos is associated with a Creative Commons license that indicates how it may be used by others. The table below shows the complete breakdown of licenses in our dataset. Approximately 31.8% is marked for commercial use, while 17.3% has the most liberal license, which only requires attribution to the photographer.

License Photos Videos
17,210,144 137,503
9,408,154 72,116
4,910,766 37,542
12,674,885 102,288
28,776,835 235,319
26,225,780 208,668

The photos and videos themselves are very diverse. We’ve found photos showing street scenes captured as part of photographer Andy Nystrom‘s life-logging activities, photos of real-world events like protests and rallies, as well as photos of natural phenomena.

Five years of Iraq war die-in IMG_9793 851-Aurora Borealis Northern Lights from Lodge near Fairbanks 1 Sep 28, 2011 1-11 AM 1600x1060
Steve Rhodes
Andy Nystrom
BJ Graf

To understand more about the visual content of the photos in the dataset, the Flickr Vision team used a deep-learning approach to find the presence of visual concepts, such as people, animals, objects, events, architecture, and scenery across a large sample of the corpus. There’s a diverse collection of visual concepts present in the photos and videos, ranging from indoor to outdoor images, faces to food, nature to automobiles.

Concept Count
outdoor 32,968,167
indoor 12,522,140
face 8,462,783
people 8,462,783
building 4,714,916
animal 3,515,971
nature 3,281,513
landscape 3,080,696
tree 2,885,045
sports 2,817,425
architecture 2,539,511
plant 2,533,575
house 2,258,396
groupshot 2,249,707
vehicle 2,064,329
water 2,040,048
mountain 2,017,749
automobile 1,351,444
car 1,340,751
food 1,218,207
concert 1,174,346
flower 1,164,607
game 1,110,219
text 1,105,763
night 1,105,296

There are 68,971,123 photos and videos in the set that have user-annotated tags. If we look at specific tags used, we see it is very common for people to use the year of capture, the camera brand, place names, scenery, and activities as tags. The top 25 tags (excluding the years of capture) and how often they were used are listed below, as well as the tag frequency distribution for the 100 most-frequently used tags.

User Tag Count
nikon 1,195,576
travel 1,195,467
usa 1,188,344
canon 1,101,769
london 996,166
japan 932,294
france 917,578
nature 872,029
art 854,669
music 826,692
europe 782,932
beach 758,799
united states 743,470
england 739,346
wedding 728,240
city 689,518
italy 688,743
canada 686,254
new york 685,311
vacation 680,142
germany 672,819
party 663,968
park 651,717
people 641,285
water 640,234

User tag distribution in the YFCC100M Dataset

Some photos and videos (3,350,768 to be exact) carry machine tags. Noteworthy machine tags are those having the “siwild” namespace, referring to photos uploaded by scientists of the Smithsonian, and the “taxonomy” namespace, which refers to photos in which flora and fauna have been carefully classified. The most frequently occurring namespace, “uploaded,” refers to the applications used to share the photos on Flickr, which are principally the Flickr and Instagram iOS apps. Other interesting machine tags are those referring to the different filters that can be applied to a photo, or roughly 750,000 photos. Overall, most machine tags are related to food and drink, events, camera and application metadata, as well as locations.

Machine Tag Count
uploaded 1,917,650
siwild 1,169,957
taxonomy 1,067,857
foursquare 894,265
exif 617,287
flickriosapp 538,829
geo 443,762
sequence 429,948
lastfm 313,379
flickrandroidapp 222,238

In terms of locations, the photos and videos in the dataset have been taken all over the world. In total, 48,366,323 photos and 103,506 videos were geotagged. The most popular cities where photos and videos were shot are concentrated in the United States, principally New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle; in Europe, they were principally London, Berlin, Barcelona, Rome and Amsterdam. There are also photos that have been taken in remote locations like Kiribati, icy places like Svalbard, and exotic places like Comoros. In fact, photos and videos from this dataset have been taken in 249 different territories (countries, islands, etc) around the world, and even in international waters or airspace.

One Million Creative Commons Geo-tagged Photos

Our dataset further reveals that there are many different cameras in use within the Flickr community. The Canon EOS 400D and 350D have a lead over the Nikon D90 (calm down…we’re not starting anything by saying that). Apple’s iPhones form the most popular type of cameraphone.

Make Camera Count
Canon EOS 400D 2,539,571
Canon EOS 350D 2,140,722
Nikon D90 1,998,637
Canon EOS 5D Mark II 1,896,219
Nikon D80 1,719,045
Canon EOS 7D 1,526,158
Canon EOS 450D 1,509,334
Nikon D40 1,358,791
Canon EOS 40D 1,334,891
Canon EOS 550D 1,175,229
Nikon D7000 1,068,591
Nikon D300 1,053,745
Nikon D50 1,032,019
Canon EOS 500D 1,031,044
Nikon D700 942,806
Apple iPhone 4 922,675
Nikon D200 919,688
Canon EOS 20D 843,133
Canon EOS 50D 831,570
Canon EOS 30D 820,838
Canon EOS 60D 772,700
Apple iPhone 4S 761,231
Apple iPhone 743,735
Nikon D70 742,591
Canon EOS 5D 699,381

Our collection of 100 million photos and videos marks a new milestone in the history of datasets. The collection is one of the largest released for academic use, and it’s incredibly varied—not just in terms of the content shown in the photos and videos, but also the locations where they were taken, the photographers who took them, the tags that were applied, the cameras that were used, etc. The best thing about the dataset is that it is completely free to download by anyone, given that all photos and videos have a Creative Commons license. Whether you are a researcher, a developer, a hobbyist or just plain curious about online photography, the dataset is the best way to study and explore a wide sample of Flickr photos and videos.  Happy researching and happy hacking!