Flickr

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.