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README.md

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-license: mit
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+license: mit
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+# 🗿 Megalith-10m
+
+### What is Megalith-10m?
+
+![](megalith_banner.jpg)
+
+Megalith-10m is a dataset of ~10 million links to Flickr images that were categorized as "photo" with [license info](https://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.licenses.getInfo.htm) of:
+
+* [No known copyright restrictions (Flickr commons)](https://www.flickr.com/commons/usage), or
+* [United States Government Work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States), or
+* [Public Domain Dedication (CC0)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/), or
+* [Public Domain Mark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Mark)
+
+### What's the intended use of Megalith-10m?
+
+Megalith-10m is intended to contain only links to wholesome unedited uncopyrighted photographs - the sort of images that we humans see when we walk around outside.
+I collected Megalith-10m for the purpose of training neural networks, but you're welcome to use Megalith-10m for whatever you want.
+Of course, I recommend conducting your own independent analysis of content and copyright status before using Megalith-linked images in Serious Projects.
+
+### How was Megalith-10m collected?
+
+I used the Flickr API to query for photos matching some basic criteria (SFW photo with CC0 / public domain license info), which gave me around 12 million links.
+I then used various filtering strategies to exclude ~2m image links which didn't appear to point to wholesome public-domain minimally-edited photos.
+These filtering strategies included:
+
+1. Account-level filtering, based on
+   1. Manual adjudication for the top 5000 most prolific accounts
+   2. Repeated-watermark detection
+2. Photo-level filtering, based on
+   1. Image metadata
+      1. Mention of copyright restrictions in the EXIF tags
+      2. Mention of copyright restrictions in the text description
+
+   2. Image content
+      1. Duplicate detection
+      2. CLIP-assisted checking for
+         1. Clearly non-photo images (illustrations, screenshots, 3d renders, etc.)
+         2. Clearly non-wholesome images (violence, nudity, etc.)
+
+      3. Minimum-resolution enforcement (at least 256x256 pixels)
+      4. Manual spot-checking of some images and metadata
+
+### What content does Megalith-10m contain?
+
+The [demo notebook](./Megalith_Demo_Notebook.ipynb) shows a random sample of 100 images being loaded from the links in Megalith-10m.
+
+Based on this random sample, I would estimate the following dataset statistics:
+
+* 5-7% of images may have minor edits or annotatations (timestamps, color grading, borders, etc.)
+* 1-2% of images may be copyright-constrained (watermarks or text descriptions cast doubt on the license metadata)
+* 1-2% of images may be non-wholesome (guns, suggestive poses, etc.)
+* 1-2% of images may be non-photos (paintings, screenshots, etc.)