Ever since signing up with Flickr a few days ago I’ve been having a ball with this community driven photo sharing web application. Even though it’s still in the obligatory beta stage, it’s jammed packed with several streamlined features. The appeal lies within its simplicity; that is the ability to upload photos, attach titles and descriptions and share them with other Flickr members.
The process of uploading a photo or a group of photos from your computer or phone is as easy as pie. After logging into the site, where you are greeted by a chihuahua chewing on a pink glove, you simply browse to your group of photos and select ‘Upload’, it’s as easy as that and yet the features included in this beta application are not only noteworthy but extremely useful. For instance, with Flash installed a slew of features are at your disposal, including:
- Add to faves. Adding the particular photo to your favorites. I haven’t poked around enough to figure out where the Favorites section is, but I know it’s storing them somewhere.
- Photo editing. The ability to edit the title and description at any point in time and an option to rotate your photo. This only applies to your photos only.
- Blog this. This option allows you to post to your blog. Flickr supports a variety of blogging applications including the likes of Blogger, Movabletype, Wordpress and others.
- Notes. One of my favorite features, this allows you to leave comments on any photo, whether it belongs to you or not so long as the owner of the photo has enabled note taking. You simply drag a box, much like you would in some photo editing software, to designate a point of reference and type your message.
- All Sizes. Clicking this will display a variety of sizes for the specific photo, including an option to save the photo directly to your hard drive. The photo sizes ranges from a thumbnail to the original size of the photo.
Among the features above is also the ability for anyone to comment on your photos. Typically this results in either madcap or insightful discussions dealing with the photo’s content. For instance, one of my photos of a lawn gnome smoking a pipe yielded a description, by none other than my good friend Max Riffner wherein he described the plastic gnome as a “pervy stalker, laying in hiding until the opportunity arises to kick someone in the shins.” With that in mind, I added a couple of notes to the picture highlighting the gnome’s hash pipe and shin-kicking boots. It’s this kind of synergy that makes Flickr not only fun and diverse but addictive as well.
A recent addition to the application allows for topic-specific groups. Joining a group is a simple as well, joining and creating your own group is just a matter of naming the group and proceeding to invite Flickr members to contribute to the discussions taking place. One such group, Disney Geeks, posts pictures from various parks including attractions, merchandise stores and outlets and behind the scenes employee shindigs. In the same vein, there is also Flickr Live, which is an interactive real-time chat program built into the web application itself. Log in and share photos, chat with your contacts and contribute to this evergrowing community.
As I mentioned Flickr is still in beta, meaning they are still working out various bugs and optimizations. A free account, which will always remain free, limits your transfer amount to 10MB a month or $120 a month. On the other hand, a Pro account, which is rumored will cost between $4 or $5 a month, gives you 1GB of transfers a month which equals to about 12GB of storage space a year. The system doesn’t limit the file size, so with that in mind you could just as easily upload a high-resolution photo at 1792×1200 or a lower resolution photo at 800×600.
I’d suggest setting up a free account and experiment with what Flickr has to offer. I guarantee that you’ll be pleased with the results from this excellent photo sharing web application.
After you invited me to check out Flickr, I was browsing through the albums. Not having heard of this before, besides the Ofoto types, which seem to be totally different, I wanted to give it a shot.
In a brief period of time I uploaded a handful of photos, joined the Disney Geeks group, and submitted some into the group. It really is cool to discuss each picture individually. Initially I was wondering what the boxes were over portions of the picture. Took me a while to figure out they were notes, and yes that is a really cool feature.
I will definitely be expounding upon my album and spend some time browsing and commenting on the pictures up for display. Maybe you could post some links to your favorite photos and/or albums.
I’m thoroughly enjoying my Pro account. Too bad I’m doing too much work to take advantage of it. But….soon.
Same here, really enjoying Flickr. They really succeeded not only on in making it easy and decidedly fun to use, but also in building a great community tool!
I’m not all that impressed with FLICKR actually – I really don’t see what all the hype is about.
Donnie: Of course we are all entitled to our opinions. I think one of the more impressive aspects of Flickr is not in it’s photo storing capabilities so much as in the level of community interaction and collaboration.
I wasn’t impressed with it when I first heard about it, on the Bonsai, but now that I’ve dug deeper into what it has to offer I’m finding it quite intuitive and useful. For the skeptic, naysayer or unimpressed I would urge you to join some groups, gain some contacts and comment on the photos of others. Soon enough you’ll see what makes Flickr special.
I find it quite fascinating actually, but again, it might not be for everyone.
One of my cardinal rules: don’t reinvent the wheel. Flickr is fabulous for sharing pictures for a casual snapshotter like myself. I usually poo-poo on social apps like this, but I love Flickr so far.
Ok, I will dig around a bit – I’ll report my findings via my site.
Doh, I was testing the invite feature, and I got an email saying to invite real friends to get the Pro account. I didn’t even realize there was a promotion for that until I got that email. Glad to know I can’t invite imaginary friends. ;)
With that said, I do have to say this service is excellent. Very slick, great web design, high in the usability factor, and very slick all around. I’m thinking it should be useful to upload pictures I take for the family to view, and the odd things I snap for memories’ sake.
I’ve jsut got into flickr and I’m loving it. I’m waiting until I’ve got a job before I get a pro account, but I’ve read up on it, and I’ve got a question: Is there any limit on the number of sets you can have on a free account?
Have any Pro invites left? I would be greatful if you give me one!