By John Roling
Now that photography has moved swiftly into the digital realm, photo-sharing sites have popped up all over the Internet. With so many choices, where do you begin? Well, Ludicorp's flickr.com (yes, with the lower-case proper name) would be a good place to start.
Flickr, an online photo community, emphasizes the social aspect of photography. It's taken many features of social networking sites like Friendster, or Orkut, and applied it to photography in some pretty unique and exciting ways.
Control
One of the best aspects of flickr is the amount of control you have over your images and how you share them. Sharing is based on your social network. You have friends, family, and contacts, and you can assign who can see certain photos based on those classifications. This is if you want to limit who can see your work, otherwise you can simply post your photos as public for everyone to see.
That's not to say that you have no control over a public photo. flickr allows you to assign a Creative Commons copyright license to all of your photos. This allows you to designate what type of copyright to apply to your work. If you want to let the photo be freely shared, you can do that, but you can also limit sharing to non-profit situations, or to anyone as long as you receive credit for taking the shot. The screenshot in Figure A shows some of the copyright options.
FIGURE A
Setting your copyright licensing. (click for larger image)
The amount of choices may seem daunting, but the interface and tools make it easy to classify your photos and even set defaults that apply to all of your photographs. In addition to the social and copyright choices, you can also tag your photos.
Tagging
Tagging is a major part of flickr. A tag is simply a keyword you've assigned to your photo. If your picture is of a sunset in Cancun during your 2002 vacation, you might tag the photo with Sunset, Cancun, 2002, and Vacation. Then you (or other people if your photo is public) can search for collections of similar photos with similar tags.
For example, searching for the tag of "sunset" on your collection will give you every photo that you've tagged with the word sunset. You can also search all of flickr and come up with every public photo in the service that has that same tag.
Also, you don't have to rely solely on the tags that you add. Any of your contacts can tag your photos as well, as shown in Figure B.
FIGURE B
The popular tags screen. (click for larger image)
So if one of your contacts notices the vacation photo I referenced in the above paragraph, they can add other tags that make sense to them. Maybe the sunset was overlooking the ocean, or maybe they thought the orange color of the sunset was particularly striking. In either case they could simply add the tags of ocean and orange respectively.
This "folksonomy", or community categorization via keywords, is what makes flickr unique in the photo-sharing world. People are collaborating, sharing their photos, and helping each other to classify them as well. This is in sharp contrast to many sites that simply lock you into their pre-defined templates and spaces.
No lock-in
flickr doesn't want you to have that locked-in and confined feeling you get with other photo sites. Your photos are yours, and you should be able to get them out of the system just the same way as you put them in. They simplify this by allowing you to go to your own photo pages and download the full-size version of any one of your photos, like you see in Figure C.
FIGURE C
You can download your original file as well as other sizes. (click for larger image)
They're even working on a way for you to download all of your files in one fell swoop.
flickr also opened up their API to outside developers for free, complete details can be found at http://www.flickr.com/services/api/. This allows people to create various tools to extend the functionality of the service in additional ways. Many tools have already popped up around the Internet that do everything from creating a rainbow montage of photos, to allowing synchronization with Apple's iPhoto.
It's this willingness to embrace the community, rather than snub it, that's gained flickr many fans, especially among bloggers.
Blogging made easy
Blogs (short for Web logs) are online journals that have really taken the Internet by storm in the last couple of years. According to Merriam-Webster, "blog" was word of the year for 2004. flickr realizes this and really tries to cater to the blogging community.
You can tie your flickr account to many of the most popular blogging tools on the market today, and publishing your flickr photos to your blog is as simple as making a couple of clicks. Even cameraphone users can set up the system so they can send pictures directly from their phone to their blog via flickr.
The flexibility doesn't end there. Each user's photos, known as their photostream, can have syndication feeds associated with them. These are RSS or Atom feeds that allow users to subscribe to a person's photos via RSS newsreader software.
This method notifies a user whenever someone posts a new picture to their stream. There are feeds for most areas on flickr, so you could subscribe to a stream with photos that have a certain tag, all the photos in a group stream, or even the textual discussion threads in a group.
Groups
The group concept is an additional level of community within flickr. There are groups that share certain types of photography, groups according to cities, countries and regions, sports groups, groups based around events, and even groups that only contain private circles of friends or colleagues.
Groups act as a shared location for people to post in a discussion forum, and for members of the group to add pictures to a shared pool. Anyone can create a group or join as many groups as they want to be a part of. Groups, shown in Figure D, can even be made public or private, so if you wanted, you could set up a private family group where all your aunts, uncles, and cousins could add photos to a shared space.
FIGURE D
The Groups screen. (click for larger image)
The possibilities of these groups are limited only by your imagination. They can be wide-open collections of people and photos, or private, tiny, invite-only affairs. There are thousands of communities being built, and this social atmosphere lends itself well to this type of photo sharing.
Downsides
Even though flickr is a revolutionary service, it's not without some warts. First and foremost, flickr is still in beta over a year after its initial launch. This means there are more bugs and downtime than with more established services. Also, due to its overwhelming popularity, the membership has grown much quicker than Ludicorp had anticipated, and that sometimes leads to slow service or outages. The flickr folks have done their best to mitigate this with hardware and data center upgrades, but it's still something to be aware of.
Also, since the service is still in beta, the feature set changes frequently. This is both good and bad. Sometimes features that users have been clamoring for suddenly appear, and other times, features people have gotten used to change or move. This can cause confusion for some people, so be forewarned.
One of the most glaring omissions is, there's no ability to currently order prints from the site. This has been one of the most requested features however, so flickr is working on getting a partner in place that will facilitate photo orders. This is something flickr plans on having in place by launch, which should hopefully be by mid-year.
Lastly, flickr is not free. There is a yearly fee involved to get all of the benefits outlined above. The membership fee allows you to upload 1GB of photos per month. This isn't a storage limit, but rather a bandwidth upload limit. So, if you uploaded your maximum every month, at the end of a year you would have 12GB worth of photos on the service.
Some people will have a problem paying for a photo service when there are free alternatives, especially when the service you're paying for is still in beta. It's the old adage though, you tend to get what you pay for, and flickr is definitely worth the cash.
For those who just cannot afford to pay, flickr does offer a free account. But it only allows for 10MB of uploads per month, and doesn't give you access to your full resolution images. So if you're a cameraphone blogger, or if you simply want to look at other people's photos, you do have a free option.
Conclusion
Despite the cost and its current beta status, flickr is a groundbreaking service that should really revolutionize the way photo-sharing sites evolve, fully deserving a 4 out of 5 rating. There are currently no other sites that give the flexibility and breadth of choices that flickr does. If you're a digital photographer, you owe it to yourself to check them out.
RATING: 4 STARSJohn Roling is an avid digital photographer, blogger and all-around techno-geek. He can be found online at http://greyhawk68.dominohosting.biz, or emailed at jroling@gmail.com.