In Berlin today Internet search engine site Yahoo! announced that its Flickr photo sharing community is now available in seven languages besides English, including French, German, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese. The Sunnyvale, California-based company purchased Flickr in March of 2004 from its original developer Ludicorp, and since then has seen the photo sharing service grow to be one of the webs largest, now receiving 24 million worldwide visitors each month, according to a press release distributed today. Canadian company Ludicorp founded Flickr in February of 2004, where it was originally part of a on-line multiplayer game. Flickr allows members to submit images and then to categorize them using labeling tags, allowing searchers a handy mechanism to find images based on the content, date, or place names contained in the photographs contained on the company’s web site.

Yahoo! believes that over half of those who use Flickr already reside outside the United States, and the multilingual additions unveiled today are hoped to “bring the Flickr community even more people around the world,” and to help Flickr members, “more easily explore, find, manage and share photos,” according to today’s press release.

With an established base of global members already in place, Stewart Betterfield, the co-founder and general manager of Flickr at Yahoo!, noted the company’s desire to unite those who share a passion for photography, stating, “Flickr has established itself as the eyes of the world, with millions of people all over the planet sharing photos of every imaginable aspect of life,” and that “Today, we're expanding our language support to make that dialogue easier and to connect those who may not speak the same language, but who share the same passions."

Flickr has worked hard to become known as more than just a simple repository for customers to store their photographs, and according to today’s press release, “fosters connections and interaction among the online community to encourage the sharing and discovery of what people see and experience in their everyday lives. Whether communicating with friends and family, conversing about shared interests, or capturing breaking news, members can upload and share photos from anywhere at anytime. Now, with multiple languages supported, members can traverse language barriers to participate in one of the fastest growing online communities and share, explore and discover over 525 million photos taken by Flickr members from all over the world.”

The company plans to hold an international series of events beginning this month in London, Montreal, Paris and Berlin, and will also unveil a book with photographs from Flickr customers all taken on one day, May 5, 2007, in a project the company calls “24 Hours of Flickr.” According to Heather Champ, a group administrator at Flickr, the book contains 122 photographs. The book is to be published using the Blurb web-based publishing service. A visit to the Flickr web site shows a nearly real-time count of how many photographs members have contributed to the service, noting “2,538 photos uploaded in the last minute, 160,129 photos tagged with morning, 1.9 million photos geotagged this month.” The company describes “geotagging” as, “the art of adding location information to things like a photo,” according to Flickr’s list of frequently-asked questions.

Presently some customers may have difficulty access Flickr’s images, as news agency Reuters is reporting today that Yahoo’s Hong Kong unit believes the Chinese government may be blocking access to Flickr images, despite today’s announcement that the site is now available in the traditional Chinese language. A Yahoo Hong Kong spokesperson has told Reuters, “It is our understanding that Flickr users in China are not able to see images on Flickr, and we have confirmed that this is not a technical issue on our end,” and also noted “We are currently investigating this issue and hope that it is only a temporary one.”

Hamed Saber, an Iranian amateur photography and Flickr enthusiast, has created a plug-in for the Mozilla’s Firefox browser that attempts to bypass access filters put in place by not only China but Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and according to the plug-in web site, “other banned countries and places.” On a Flickr message forum relating to Mr. Saber’s Firefox plug-in, called Access Flickr!, a number of users in China who have installed his plug-in have noted that they have been successfully able to view the complete Flickr web site today, and several have expressed their gratitude to Saber for creating his workaround to the Chinese access restriction.

Despite the access trouble noted for those trying to access Flickr in China, company general manager and co-founder Steve Butterfield told the Associated Press today that with the additional seven languages added today the web site will work with “all the languages that are heavily used on the Internet,” and added, “We’ll see a significant uptick in growth.”

On the Flickr blog today, Ludicorp web producer George Oates writes of the additional languages, “This is one of our most requested features and one of our longest standing ambitions, so it is thrilling to see it actually happen,” and adds, “we hope to better support our non-English speaking members in their languages, as well as their networks of friends and family in the future.” Ms. Oates also calls the development project one of the largest in Flickr’s history. Explaining how easily Flickr customers may switch between any of the new languages added today, Oates states, “Changing your language is as easy as clicking on the language links available at the footer of every page. We’ll remember your selection for your next visit.”