6 years ago today, Flickr launched at eTech in San Diego. Team Flickr would like to thank you all for your incredible generosity — in the billions of photos and video you share daily, to the tens of thousands of groups you’ve created and participate in. Without you, Flickr would be a very white site with little colour. You are the heart of the Flickrverse. Happy Birthday!

As with previous years, we’ll be hosting a birthday party here in San Francisco within the coming months. Stay tuned for details as we get our ducks in a row.

Photo from Caterina.

Ever wish there was an easy way to view Flickr photos in large? Take a look at The Big Pictr, an application by Magical Trevor that we found growing in the App Garden.

The Big Pictr lets you quickly view large Flickr photos in all their glory. You can even curate your own collections to share on the Big Pictr site, so that others can also admire the images, too. A handy bookmarklet makes navigating Flickr photostreams easy!

Take a look at what The Big Pictr can do:

Application by Trevor H. Various photos in the screencast and screenshot from aragost, cortto, Koo Hayakawa, Rhino and Bird, Laurence and Kevin.

There’s been some interesting faces appearing in the Flickrverse – it can only mean one thing – the Carnival of Venice has arrived.

Also spotted amongst the Carnival celebrations – the Volo dell’Angelo (or flight of the angel), which serves as an opening event for the festivities and features an ‘angel’ gliding down from the cathedral’s bell tower in Piazza San Marco.

Explore Venice at your leisure with some wondrous Venice Carnival clusters.

Photos from David Pin, EMIL CENZATO and Sartos13.

Photos from sakura love, sibemolle, Eddie . ., and Life in AsiaNZ.

The Washington DC metro area had record amounts of snowfall the last couple of days and people are digging out from a lot of the white stuff, but it looks like it didn’t keep photographers inside or people from getting out and having fun!

Photos and video from Mr. T in DC, Juliet M, valkyrieh116, lifeinthedistrict, Dave Stroup and Rukasu1. Check out more by tag or in the Snowpocalypse – DC/MD/VA and DCSnowpocalypse2 pools.

Photos from buckaroo kid, p0cket-paul., Herschell Hershey, flavita.valsani, lomokev, revlimit, and jenaardell.

Up Helly Aa refers to any of a variety of fire festivals held in Shetland, in Scotland, annually in the middle of winter to mark the end of the yule season. The festival involves a procession of up to a thousand guizers in Lerwick and considerably lower numbers in the more rural festivals, formed into squads who march through the town or village in a variety of themed costumes. ~ Wikipedia

It looks like the Vikings weren’t the only invaders.

Photos and video from Stealth Robin, BURLINGTONBREW, CaptainOates, ionayarrow, Richard Parker, acidust, and Helen F H.

Enjoy a rare view of the American West as photographed by Timothy O’Sullivan in the late 1800s. O’Sullivan began his photography career as an apprentice to Mathew Brady, the famed U.S. Civil War photographer. The joint exhibition and publication “Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan,” put together by The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, contains incredible images from two government expeditions into the Western U.S.: the King survey of the 40th parallel and the Wheeler survey west of the 100th meridian.

Happily, Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress have just uploaded highlights of this collection to The Commons for you to annotate, tag, share and enjoy.

See and learn more more about this important colloborative effort in the Timothy H. O’Sullivan group on Flickr. If you have contemporary images of the locations in these O’Sullivan photographs, you’re welcome to add them to the group!

Photos from the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution.

Are you into nature and wildlife photography? Then hop over to the App Garden for two applications that will help you locate wildlife near you and share your photos of the wild kingdom with others. Both applications power websites that include Flickr photos, trips of animal sightings, and communities of nature enthusiasts.

Simon Willison and the team at Wildlife Near You built an app that allows you to share trip reports and wildlife sightings as well as search for wildlife near you. Import your Flickr photos of wildlife so that the community can help you identify the species in your photos.

Adam Jack’s WildObs also allows you to import your photos for identification and discovery. They make great use of geolocation data, too, placing a map right on the photo page. Both applications link your photos back to Flickr, too, so that visitors can comment, fave, or check out the rest of your photostream.

Enjoy your wildlife encounters!

Applications by Simon Willison and Adam Jack.

Photos from no.33, Brandon Christopher Warren, Greenpin Chang, poveralice, and ali khurshid.