The rise and fall of the social media platform Flickr: Implications for nature recreation research

Social media is increasingly used as data source for studying nature recreation, with Flickr being one of the most used sources. Nevertheless, a detailed understanding of these global social media datasets – their geographical and temporal distributions – remains limited. First, we reviewed literature studying nature recreation with social media data to investigate how Flickr has been used and what has motivated its use for research purposes. Second, we described the spatiotemporal characteristics of 229 million georeferenced uploads and 1.5 million users in general and in protected areas during 2010–2022. Finally, we tested the reliability of data acquisition via Flickr’s Application Programming Interface (API). We found extensive use of Flickr in nature recreation research, where its use is most often motivated by data accessibility. However, the volume of Flickr data and the platform’s active user base in 2022 had more than halved from its peak in 2011. Geographically, the use of Flickr is strongly biased to Europe and North America. Flickr data are scarcely available from less-visited protected areas. Much of Flickr data from African and Asian protected areas are produced by visitors from Europe and North America. Finally, we found that Flickr’s API responds inconsistently to spatiotemporal queries, compromising the acquisition of full coverage datasets and the transparency and transferability of research. Flickr has been an important data source despite its relatively small and geographically concentrated user base. Future research use of the data requires careful consideration of these limitations and their impacts in different research contexts.

Management implications

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  Flickr is a popular data source in nature recreation research for analysing visitation patterns and preferences of people.
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  Insights from Flickr can inform plans and strategies for sustainable management of nature-based tourism and recreation, however, underlying properties of the data should be acknowledged when using these data.
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  Flickr’s popularity has dropped and the data are skewed towards active users in the Global North.
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  Flickr’s API may cause inconsistencies in data acquisition, jeopardizing repeatability of findings.
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  Thus, the usefulness of these data for understanding nature-based recreation is limited and a critical view is needed when using them in research and practice.