Most people’s hard drives contain albums worth of digital photos. Taking digital photos is easy; finding a way to share them with others and organize them isn’t always so easy. Flickr is one of the most popular online photo sharing services and as you read over the features in this article, you’ll understand why. In this article we provide an overview of what Flickr is and what it can be for you, its history and then how to actually use it.
About Flickr
Flickr.com is one of the most popular photo sharing sites where you can upload, store and organize your digital photos in a convenient, easy, safe and most importantly –fun way. You can publish images of people, places, wildlife, just about whatever you want. You can upload photos from your computer and also from your camera phone via MMS or through GPRS.
A Flickr account gives you a generous 100MB of space each month with limited admission for sets and group pools. A Flickr Pro account costs US $24.95 per year and gives you unlimited space for photos, videos, sets and bandwidth. Flickr has the best deal compared to competing services. Once you upload, all your photos, you need to do is organize them into sets, tag them and send a link to the slideshow to your friends or family. Recently, Flickr also launched a video sharing facility that can be used only by Pro account members. Videos can be a maximum of 90 seconds in length and 150MB.
The History of Flickr
Flicker was founded by Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield (and husband/wife team) in the year 2004. The project was started off as a photo-sharing feature of a gaming project before it transformed into Flickr. The couple started Flickr without any financial support from venture capitalists; their only investors were friends and family members. They started to implement various tools and features to their website to make it a complete photo sharing website, quickly attracting the attention of major web service providers. In March 2005 Flickr was acquired by the internet giant Yahoo for US $35 Million.
Main Features of Flickr
When it comes to uploading photos, Flickr is very user friendly as it comprises different tools for different operating systems. Flickr has introduced some nice collaborative features which enable you to upload and organize your photos in a better way compared to other sites. The photos in the public database are divided and categorized into different domains. You can also create photosets, a personal profile, a photo pool, user groups and view photos as a slideshow
Flickr provide different software to handle the uploads, based on the OS your PC is running on:
Flickr Uploadr for Windows XP, 2000, ME and 98,
Flickr Uploadr for Mac OS X 10.3,
1001 for Mac OS X,
iPhoto plugin for Mac OS X.
You can also upload photos by e-mail or camera phone using other software and if you have a Nokia phone you can upload photos directly to Flickr through NOKIA Lifeblog software.
Getting started with Flickr is trouble-free. It easy to create an account and once it is established the service is straightforward and easy to navigate.
Flickr pays a strong attention to security side. Every photo or video to be uploaded must be authorized before it can be uploaded. Flickr doesn’t allow pornographic materials.
Another fantastic feature of Flickr is the built-in feed service. Once you have subscribed to RSS feed you can directly view the most recently uploaded photos on that feed. RSS is not a default option - you have to subscribe to make use of this facility.