Flickr.com

...you make your way to flickr.com and have a bit of a look around. You can browse just by searching keywords (why not try: collembola (especially if you don't know what one is) and sort by most interesting or anything else you fancy looking at), you could have a look at popular tags, you can look around the map (see what is interesting where you live), you can choose to browse by camera - to see what people can do with the same piece of kit as you, ... more

Flickr is a photosharing, photostorage and photoorganizing (yes I know that isn't a word) website. It is also a social networking site. Not so long ago, flickr became part of Yahoo in some way - I am not sure of the specifics, so now you can use a yahoo ID to sign in.

++Site Design++

The pages are clean and crisp, with all white backgrounds and simple text with a blue and pink logo and colour scheme for the link text. Some people choose to link to pages where their photos are shown on a different colour - usually black - if they feel it is a better background for that particular photo. Each photo has a title above and description underneath. Then there is a bit of data about the photo underneath that. Once you have clicked on a photo it will be displayed on its own page with this information and more. It is relatively easy to navigate around the site once you have figured out what all the words mean. You can choose how your page looks to a certain extent - how big the thumbnails are and where sets appear on the screen.

++Features++

Ok, this is going to be tough, because there are so many, but I will try not to make it too much like a long and boring list. Here is the basic flickr vocab:

TAGS - these are descriptive words of your choosing which you attach to your photo (or other people do) which help you sort and search for your photos, but also let other people know what's in them when searching. It's all very web 2.0.

SETS - basically a folder of your photos. There are also collections, which can contain sets. It's a way to put a group of photos together.

GROUPS - These are groups of people who share an interest, or attended an event or anything really. They can share their photos in the group's photo POOL.

NOTES - You can highlight part of a photo with a little square and attach a comment to it. It will be visible when the cursor is placed over the picture - it will also say who it is from.

COMMENTS - there is a space under each photo for comments. Some photos seem to have nearly infinite numbers of comments.

INTERESTINGNESS - this is a slightly mysterious flickr term, and purposely so I think. Interestingness and how it is defined is a very closely guarded secret, but I think it has in part to do with number of views, comments, notes and tags on a photo as well as the number of times other people have marked that photo as a favourite. The photos in your account will be arranged by interestingness in the popluar section (only you can see this) and the most interesting photos on flickr appear in the explore section. It is a big deal to make explore (I have never made it).

++Free account vs. Pro++
With a free account you get:
• up to 200 photos displayed (you can upload more, but only the 200 most recent will be displayed - the rest don't disappear though, but you can't see or retrieve them)
• 100MB upload PER CALENDAR MONTH
• Three Sets (no collections)
• Posting allowed in only 10 groups or pools
• Only smaller photo sizes available

With a pro account you get:
• Unlimited uploads (10MB per photo)
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited photosets - and you can use collections
• Archiving of high-resolution original images which you can download again from anywhere
• The ability to replace a photo, which comes in handy when you've put in all the descriptions and then realise someone has really bad red eye
• Post any of your photos in up to 60 group pools
• Ad-free browsing and sharing (I admit I did not notice the ads when I had a free account)

When I began using flickr I just had a free account and I only upgraded when I had more than 200 photos. The free account is extremely useful and perfectly serviceable, however, when I upgraded to the pro account, I really noticed the difference. For me, it is worth the $24.95 per year. But there's no need to rush into it. And if you're really good, someone may buy you a pro account as a present.

I will say that there is the trouble that once you've started paying for a pro account, you are unlikely to ever want to go back to a free one, so you are basically committing to the annual charge forever. Something to bear in mind before you jump in.

++So what can you do?++

1) Uploading:

There is a nice basic web form for uploading photos, which is great if like me you regularly upload a few photos. But, if you want to upload a huge batch there are flickr uploadrs for windows, mac and linux operating systems. That keeps the computer people happy, and if you can't be without it while you're out of the house, you can now upload from your mobile and even using a special email address if you can't get to the webpage.

When you upload the photo it keeps the original size, but also resizes it for thumbnail viewing and various other states. You can download the original size from your own account from anywhere in the world, and from other people's accounts too, if you have permission. You can change the permissions on your photos for downloading and many other things, more of that later.

2) Organising (or Organizing as it's called in American English)

The Organizr is where you can do pretty much anything to all, some or one of your photos. You get a long line of them across the bottom of the screen - it starts with all and you can filter it - and a big gap in which to drag the ones you want to alter. The options for altering are: Edit photos (tags, descriptions, rotate, delete) permissions (see, comment and tag, license, content description and safety filter), you can add tags, add to sets, send to groups, put them on a map - geotagging - (I really love this feature) arrange your sets and collections and manage your groups.

If you live in the USA you can also send your photos directly to a printer and have them sent to your house, but unfortunately that features isn't available in the UK yet.

3) Contacts

Contacts are important for your social networking needs (I am terrified of these, so don't ask me about them) but also for keeping up to date with your friends photos (this page will show you the latest five photos from each of your contacts). Unlike other networking sites, being made a contact isn't a two way thing. So I can call someone a contact just to keep an eye on their photos because I like them, without any obligation for them to pay any attention to me at all. (There is a lovely lady in Canada who has horses and I am rather fond of seeing what those horses are up to in front of the glorious landscape. And a funny man in Mexico somewhere keeps and eye on my photos and sometimes asks odd questions.) You can also use your contacts to choose who gets to see which photos.

If your family refuse to sign up for an account, you can also make some photos more private with a guest pass - honestly I don't really know how this works as my family are so useless they probably couldn't even work that out.

4) Groups

This is where you can see what has been happening in your groups. As mentioned before I am not good at the networking stuff, so I don't belong to many groups, however, I am aware that they have a number of uses. For example, you could make a group for your wedding, and everyone who went can join and upload their photos, so then they are all in one place and everyone can see everyone's - groups can be public or private.

5) Explore

This is where you can see the work of the great and the good of the flickr world displayed in all its glory. Some of the photos really are amazing and others are just perplexing, and some you won't be able to work out how they made it into explore in the first place.

***** A few others: you can view anything as a slideshow, they have recently introduced statistics for your account - for when you really have nothing better to do, there seem to be a million flickr toys for updating your profile and playing around, the glorious map, mentioned briefly above (you have to geotag your photos) where you can see where all your photos were taken.

***** Importantly, you should not have to look at anything you find offensive on flickr. It has a safe search function, and you can flag any photo of yours that you don't think everyone and their grandma would like to happen upon, you can also flag other people's photos for the same reason. Someone in flickrland will then review the content of that photo. People who don't follow the community guidelines on this will be reprimanded and may have their accounts terminated.

++Usefullness++

A lot of flickr users seem to be real photographers, whether they be professionals or serious amateurs, and they use the site to gather feedback on their work and get ideas from other photographers.
You can use the site to make friends and exchange ideas - photographic or not.

Personally I have a different reason. My family has recently grown (by one daughter) at roughly the same time as the branches of our family tree have dispersed somewhat. So in order for her grandparents to keep an eye - across county borders and across the channel - on the goings on and growings in my daughters life, I have been taking various pictures. It also means that my university friends and more distant relations can have a little peak at what I am doing, and more importantly what my daughter looks like (this is an important part of friendship - as is the not saying the rude things to the parent of any child).

It started off as a challenge from a friend - can you take one picture a day for a whole year? (I managed it, except for one day). And then when my daughter's first birthday came around, I decided to take a picture of her every day for a year. So right now, I am only taking one portrait a day. But using flickr in this way has really changed how I live my life everyday. I carry my camera with me everywhere and I take pictures of anything I see that is interesting. Some are rubbish, yes, but others are really good. And you don't realise how much a child grows everyday until you look back at the old photos.

I have another reason for being such a big fan of flickr and that is what I am now calling "the great computer disaster of 2007". Basically, our computer died, rather dramatically, taking with it every single shred of data. Even when we sent it to a data recovery company they were only able to recover a tiny amount. So flickr has kept a small number of my photos safe - and I regularly back up the new ones to an external hard drive.

•••••••••In Summary••••••••

Flickr is a very user friendly site with more features that you can shake a stick at. It is possibly less seriously photographer based than some of its competitors (PBase perhaps) but I have not used any others personally, so perhaps I am wrong.

If you are interested in it, I suggest you make your way to flickr.com and have a bit of a look around. You can browse just by searching keywords (why not try: collembola (especially if you don't know what one is) and sort by most interesting or anything else you fancy looking at), you could have a look at popular tags, you can look around the map (see what is interesting where you live), you can choose to browse by camera - to see what people can do with the same piece of kit as you, or you can look for people you know in the people section. Or just browse straight to Explore to see what everyone else is looking at. 

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