Rafe's Flickr Archive

Why are you making this particular Data Lifeboat?
This collection documents the rise and fall of Symbian — the smartphone operating system that predated iOS and Android — through photographs taken during a decade of covering the mobile industry as founder and editor of All About Symbian (allaboutsymbian.com, 2005–2014) and later All About Windows Phone (allaboutwindowsphone.com, 2011–2017).

The images include hands-on photography of Nokia and other Symbian devices, coverage from industry events such as Mobile World Congress and Nokia World, and documentation of the hardware and software that defined early smartphone culture before the iPhone reshaped the market. At its peak, All About Symbian reached over a million readers monthly and published nearly 25,000 articles across its family of sites.

These photographs have historical value as primary source material from a pivotal period in consumer technology. Symbian powered the majority of the world's smartphones from the early 2000s until approximately 2012, yet visual documentation of the platform, its devices, and the events surrounding its development is increasingly scarce online. This archive preserves that record, along with whatever metadata, tags, and community context Flickr captured at the time.

The collection was originally hosted on Flickr as a working photo library supporting the publications. It is archived here to ensure its long-term preservation independent of any single platform.

What's important to you about these photos?
This is also a portion of my digital photographs - pre-dating automatic upload to the cloud, so they are more curated that the mass collections of today. They also include a large number of Symbian device albums (from launch events and reviews), which catalogue some of the early smartphone era.

What is it for?
This Data Lifeboat was built for personal and archiving use.

Additional Questions

Imagine your Data Lifeboat is unearthed in 60 years from now. What would you want the person looking at it to know?
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And what would you want them to know about you?
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How would you feel if someone made this Data Lifeboat public after that length of time?
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Can you think of anything you wouldn't want that person to use this Data Lifeboat for?
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What do you know about the people in these pictures?
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Are you a member of the community or communities depicted in this Data Lifeboat?
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How do you imagine those people would feel about you including pictures of them?
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Can you think of any potential privacy issues people in the images may have concerns about—or be compromised by? Even a long time from now?
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Who would you like to share this Data Lifeboat with?
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Where are you planning to keep it?
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Do you think this archive contains any sensitive information future viewers should know about, even in comments or descriptions?
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What unintended consequences or potential harms can you envision?
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If you think about this Data Lifeboat coming from a moment in time, what else could you say about the collection? What contemporary information or trends or contexts might be interesting to note?
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What kind of harmful material is lurking in this Data Lifeboat, or what convinced you there isn't any?
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If you could donate this Data Lifeboat to any archive in the world, which one would you choose, and why?
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