YFCC100M
YFCC100M (the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million dataset) gathers 100M photos and videos uploaded to Flickr, every one released by its owner under a Creative Commons licence. It is a long-standing benchmark for research in computer vision and multimedia retrieval.
Each item comes with rich metadata: tags, titles and descriptions, camera details, timestamps, and often geolocation. That context makes it useful well beyond image-text pairing, for example in place recognition or temporal analysis.
The catch is licensing. The Creative Commons licence differs by item, from the permissive CC BY through to NonCommercial variants, so the terms that apply to one photo may not apply to the next. Filter on the per-item licence before building anything you plan to ship.
Related sources
Conceptual Captions (CC3M / CC12M)
A cleaned image alt-text dataset for automatic image captioning, produced by Google Research. Alt-text pulled from the web is filtered and generalised (hypernymed), replacing specific names with broader categories. Available in 3.3M (CC3M) and 12M (CC12M) variants.
DataComp
A benchmark and dataset collection for training multimodal models. It provides a shared pool of image-text candidates and an evaluation framework so teams can test different data-curation strategies against a common yardstick.
LAION-5B
An image-text dataset of over 5.8B examples, built by filtering Common Crawl with a CLIP model that scores how well an image matches a caption. Includes 2.32B English pairs, 2.26B multilingual pairs, and 1.27B not tied to any particular language. Provides URLs, not the images themselves.
OBELICS
A web-scale dataset of 141M multimodal English web documents that interleave text and images, containing 353M images and 115 billion tokens. Unlike image-caption pair datasets, it keeps whole documents with text and images in their original order. Used to train the IDEFICS models.