Flickr was launched on Feb 10, 2004, by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake.
The service emerged from tools created for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game.
Early versions of Flickr focused on a chat room called FlickrLive, with real-time photo exchange capabilities.
In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs and an online community, on Dec 9, 2004, the service was widely used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.
Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr on Mar 20, 2005. The acquisition reportedly cost $22M to $25M.