---

Flickr is a photo-sharing site that lets you upload your photos, and make them more interesting to an audience by adding comments, descriptions, and tags to them.

Photos can be grouped in sets.

Flickr provides several ways to share your uploaded photos:

• You can choose to share them with everyone--Flickr calls this sort of sharing public.
• You can create two distinct sharing options called friends and family. In this case, anyone who is on your friends list, or family list can view the photos.
• Flickr also allows you to provide both friends and family sharing options--these contacts can view photos from either distinction.
• Finally, if you don't want to share the photos with anyone but yourself--in that case you designate such photos as private.

Whichever way you share your photos, the best thing about Flickr is that you no longer have to worry about web hosting, creating photo thumbnails, or sending huge email attachments containing your photos!

Not surprisingly, Flickr has became immensely popular in a short time--in fact so popular that Yahoo! acquired the site--Flickr is now part of Yahoo!

I really like Flickr--it's easy to use, and has so many features that you'll need some time to explore them all. At last count, Flickr had over 2.5 million members and that number must have been old news by now!

Having said that, I found no good Flickr related site that explains everything that a beginner or even a seasoned user wants to know. Maybe that's because Flickr is so easy to use--but Flickr has so many features that you'll never know about if you don't go exploring!

Luckily, I've been doing so much Flickr exploring these days. In coming blog posts, I'm going to discuss a lot of Flickr related stuff--I'll also look at other photo-hosting sites, free photo resources, stock imagery, etc.


Figure: A screenshot from the Flickr site

If you click the above screenshot, it will take you straight to my photo collection of over 500 (as of the time of writing) public photos hosted on Flickr. Remember the above link will open a new browser window or tab and if your popup blocker doesn't allow you to open a new window, just right-click the image and choose one of the Open options--these options are a little different depending upon which browser you use.

Feel free to sign into Flickr--if you already have a Yahoo! mail ID, you can use that to sign into Flickr. In fact, here is a tutorial on signing into Flickr for the first time...

Flickr is a great time-waster as well--just search for a picture on any topic and you might be surprised by the visual content that is shown. It's almost like a photo dictionary put up by users all over the world! I even found 10 pictures when I searched for the keyword "gobbledygook"!!! Flickr also has a page with the most popular keywords people are searching.

Naturally many people won't call that wasting time! And actually, you don't even need to be a member to view all the public photos on Flickr. Membership brings you many more options though. Flickr provides two types of memberships--Free and Pro. I'll tell you more about the difference and how you can use this wonderful site in upcoming posts.

See Also: Flickr Tutorial Series

1 comments

Links to this post

---

Links to this post: