Flickr for Photos

In celebration of my new camera. Today’s post will be covering flickr.

Flickr is a photo sharing site that was recently acquired by Yahoo! It has a very large user base of enthusiastic photographers sharing their recently captured photographs. It is a free service which is limited by monthly bandwith restrictions. There is also a “pro” version that eliminates these bandwith quotas.

First off, if you do not own a camera or have no interest in sharing your digital pictures, flickr is still a very useful site. You can use flickr to find great images. Either use their search to find photos on a specific topic or just browse some interesting photos. There are some incredible people in the world taking extrodinary pictures. After awhile, you may find that you want to start taking more pictures yourself.

After creating an account, if you want to share your masterpieces on flickr, you will first need to choose a way to upload them. There are a large number of ways to get your photos onto flickr. There is a list here, and these include things from desktop applications to email. There are even cameras that will upload directly to flickr.

Once uploaded, your images are being shared over the internet. Flickr then allows you to do more along the lines of organization. You can apply tags, descriptions, titles and more to describe your photos and assist people in finding them when doing searches. You can also organize your photos into sets and collections. This will help give more meaning and overarching themes to your photographs.

After all that you are already knee deep into flickr. The basics are uploading and organizing your photos, but you can go further than that with cards, stickers and prints. You can also get your friends and family signed up so that you can all share those precious moments, no matter how far away you live.

To check out the photos that I am sharing on flickr, visit me here. Also you can follow the photos taken with my new camera here.