For Lafayette College students, spotting the campus photographer is a sign to sit up straight, fix their hair and say “cheese.” If the resulting image ends up on the college Instagram or in an admissions pamphlet, you’ve made it.

Tens of thousands of photos taken by Lafayette photographers also land on the photo-sharing site Flickr, which the college’s communications division has used for digital image distribution and storage since 2010. For a sprawling web of anonymous Flickr users, however, Lafayette’s Flickr page — and those of many other schools — is a curated collection of pornographic material.

Users have pulled candid campus photos of female students into public albums of young women and children in low-cut shirts, or women without any clothes at all. Female staff photographed at college holiday parties can be found in fetish albums of women in nylons. Images of dancers with pom poms at football games have been saved by people who fetishize armpits and spandex.

An analysis by The Lafayette of 50 university Flickr pages — including community colleges, research universities, mid-size state schools and many of Lafayette’s liberal arts peers — saw 43 with their most-saved images dominated by pornographic accounts. Flickr pages run by a local K-12 private school and a local private high school also have content saved by fetish accounts.

Many of these institutions — including Lafayette College — expressed that they were unaware of this use of their content before being approached by The Lafayette.

Among Lafayette’s 25 most popular images — a statistic determined by how many “faves” or saves a given photo has — 92% of publicly viewable interactions are from users who primarily save pornographic or fetish content. Half of the most popular photos are of Lafayette College President Nicole Hurd sitting with her legs crossed, with all visible faves being from fetish accounts.

“It is a painful reminder in 2025 of what it’s like to be a female leader and a female president,” Hurd said in an interview. “All the things you see on our Flickr page, those are all college activities, and nobody should ever be sexualized or exploited for doing their job or representing the college or showing up in the world as their full selves.”

Asked if the college would explore alternatives to Flickr, Hurd said, “Absolutely, absolutely.”

Digital breadcrumbs for fetishists to follow

Flickr user @fjfgrhek53 has saved roughly 200 photos of young women and children to 18 galleries, each dedicated to a specific trait: large breasts, braces, swimsuits.

The user added Lafayette’s most popular Flickr upload — a female student during her freshman move-in — to a gallery with 44 other photos featuring young women with cleavage at summer camp, on family trips or eating. The album has 3,000 views, and the Lafayette photo has 14,000.

User @ffsauxrp96 has faved more than 1 million images, including four of Hurd at a 2022 meet-and-greet in Boston. The user added one of the images to a gallery called “000-29,” one of 650 galleries with about 500 photos of women and teens in heels and nylons.

The female student said she was uncomfortable commenting. The Flickr users did not respond to direct messages.

Flickr allows users to easily see what others fave and save to galleries, which cannot be made private, allowing people with like fetishes to find one another without difficulty. Fetish accounts that have built up large stockpiles of images scraped from college, business and personal accounts amass followings in the thousands.

Other social media platforms make viewing user activity more difficult. Instagram, which has its own longstanding issues with sexual material and minors, sunset its “Following Activity” tab in 2019, and users’ saved photos are hidden. Facebook allows users to join groups and see accounts that others like, but most other user activity is private.

While Flickr’s openness is core to its “community-driven platform, it also means inappropriate behavior is more readily identifiable and reportable,” Flickr Trust & Safety team lead Elliott McIsaac wrote in an email.

“When non-pornographic images are being collected or favorited in ways that sexualize the subjects without consent, this can indeed violate our Terms of Use, particularly when it involves harassment or inappropriate sexualization,” he wrote. He noted that individuals can report users or restrict who can interact with their content.

McIsaac added that the volume of problematic behavior represented “an extremely small percentage of the billions of photos and interactions” on the platform.

“However, we acknowledge that even a small percentage can impact many users, which is why we continue investing in detection and prevention measures,” he continued.

Innocence is the appeal

The internet has always been used for porn. Much of the internet’s infrastructure — like digital image processing, credit card payments and forums — was built for or is supported by the pornography industry, said Noelle Perdue, who studies and writes about online sexuality after years of working in porn production.

“It’s very difficult to have any part of the internet untouched by the expectation or the existence of porn,” Perdue, who refers to herself as a “porn historian,” wrote in an email.

Flickr has a generous nudity policy compared to competitors, drawing the line at videos of full frontal nudity or sexually explicit conduct. Images containing nudity or sexually suggestive content are permitted on the platform, but are restricted from some users. Among mainstream social media and photo-sharing platforms, only X and Tumblr have more lax nudity policies.

But for many Flickr users, viewing nudity isn’t the goal.

“These people aren’t looking for porn (there are many places to get porn online), they’re looking for something made specifically not as porn, to use as porn,” Perdue wrote. “The lack of consent to the images being taken into a sexual context is where the taboo eroticism comes from.”

From pit stains to amputees to dunk tanks, there is an audience for nearly every niche. Even a Colgate University photo of former President Joe Biden wasn’t safe, saved by several Flickr users who seemingly fetishize older men in suits.

“The internet is truly a horrible place,” wrote Adam Atkinson, Lafayette’s former head of photography, in an email. Atkinson  — who stepped down from his role in April — said the communications division had not noticed misuse of photos during his time, though he and his team “were never fans” of Flickr.

“There are all sorts of bugs with Flickr that we just had to tolerate,” he wrote. “Alas Flickr is free to use for the college.”

Atkinson said there were murmurs of transitioning the college to a more advanced — and private — digital asset management system in the year before he left Lafayette, but with high costs and disparate needs across campus, he said, the discussion didn’t make it off the ground.

Kathryn Meier, who oversees the communications division and is ultimately responsible for the Flickr page, wrote in an email that the college was “actively exploring whether there are any additional actions or privacy settings” it could utilize on Flickr, and that it would “act accordingly based on those findings.”

“In partnership with ITS and colleagues across campus, we also intend to review the College’s digital asset management systems broadly,” she continued.

In the hours after The Lafayette reached out to Claremont McKenna College, whose most popular Flickr photos — young women with large breasts — had racked up hundreds of thousands of views, the California school deleted all 35,000 of its photos, which had to be done individually, about 20 at a time. Michigan’s Albion College removed more than half of its 18,000 photos within hours of being reached for comment.

Moravian University — whose most popular photo was added to a gallery with more than 34,000 views of women with nipples visible through their shirts — pledged to explore ways to “strengthen protections” for its campus. A representative for Moravian Academy, a K-12 private school with campuses in Allentown and Bethlehem that is not related to the university, said that the misuse of its photos was not a “fundamentally different risk than other social media.”