Flickr

Flickr is a photo sharing service that greatly emphasizes the community – chances are you’re already on the site. It can become an integral part of your own photographic workflow if you wish it to be so, but if not it’s still a great resource to use if you want to get feedback on your photography or backup you pictures. Let’s take a closer look at what makes flickr “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world“.

Flickr is, in simple terms, a photo-hosting website, starting out as an independent website and later being acquired by Yahoo. But flickr is also a community of people who love to take photos, share them, and bond together with people of similar interests. These can be public or private; educational or entertaining; utterly normal or as far off the deep end as you can think. Flickr provides multitudes of opportunities for people to see your photos, enjoy your photos, and see the different aspects of who you are, based on the subject matter of your photos of choice.

Flickr offers the ability for it’s users to upload photos and share them. The site allows users to comment on each photo with the comments feature, or add notes directly on the pictures. It makes organizing things a breeze, with a powerful organizer, tags, sets and collections. You may join groups and send photos to them based on the interests of the groups; you can moderate who can see and comment on your photos with varied privacy settings, and much more.

The two types of memberships

Flickr has two different memberships: a free service and the PRO account. The PRO account sets you back 24.95 per year. The free membership is limiting several features of flickr. The free version grants you (at the time of this writing) 100mb of upload capabilities per month where each photo can be 5mb. This is total uploads; uploading then deleting a photo will still count towards your upload limit. You may show up to 200 photos at a time (any above this number are then invisible to others), and you may have three sets to organize your photos. You may join and send photos to up to 10 different groups, and while you can upload large photos, only the resized versions will be available.

The PRO account offers quite a bit more. You receive unlimited upload capabilities, though individual photos are limited to 10mb each. You have unlimited groups, sets, collections, bandwidth, and storage. The high-def version of each of your photos is stored in its original form. You have the ability to replace photos, you may join up to 60 groups, and you get ad-free browsing. For a full comparison have a look at the flickr faq.

If you decide that you want to try flickr it’s time to sign up. The process is simple and fast. First and foremost, you’ll need a Yahoo! Account. The name you choose here does not need to be your display name on flickr. When you go to the flickr page, you’ll click on the “Create Your Account” button on the right hand side. This will take you to the flickr/Yahoo! Sign in page, where you’ll need to create a new Yahoo! id. This will take just a few minutes. After that, you’re good to go. You can choose whatever e-mail you want to receive correspondence at; you can change your username on flickr at any time. You can update your profile whenever you like, and it’s quite easy to change your avatar.

Uploading photos from the web interface

If you go to the main flickr page after logging in, press the big link called Upload Photos to get started on your photo sharing adventure. You can also click Upload from the drop-down menu after clicking You in the top menu.

flickr - upload

Click the link, and you’ll be taken to the upload page. Follow the guidelines and make sure your pictures less than 10 megabytes if you’re on a free account. Flickr’s usability is fantastic, so just do what says on the screen: start by clicking on the upload button, select the files you want to upload, select to whom you want to show the photographs and continue on by clicking on the pink Upload photos and videos button. Done. Your pictures are now on flickr.

Now would be a good time to add some meta data to your nice photographs, so it’s not a bad idea to follow flickr’s add a description-link.

At the top you’ll find batch operations for all of your uploaded pictures. Choose to add tags to all of them or place them all in a set. Below that you can edit the title, description or tag of the individual image. You can change any of these aspects later in the future at any time, so don’t worry. Just click save, and your pictures will appear in your photostream.

Not that hard, right? But to make it even easier, the flickr team has created a few more ways to upload just in case.

Looking at individual photos

Once you’ve uploaded a photo, you can navigate to the individual photo listing to get access to a few more goodies.

From the menu above the photo you’re able to do a who a few things. The most interesting at this stage is All sizes which lets you see the different sizes of a photo – flickr automatically scales photos into a square (75×75), thumbnail (100xZ), small (240xZ), medium (500xZ), large (1024xZ) and original size. If you click on this button you’ll get access to the URLs of the differently sized images – URLs that you can pull in to your site. I use this on linusbohman.se, for instance. If you want to automate the posting of images to your Wordpress site, you can set it up so that the Blog this button automatically posts to your site. Very useful if you want to streamline your workflow.

If you click on the title or description you can edit them on the fly. To the right you can add new tags, and below you’ll see peoples comments.

Organizing your pictures

Flickr comes with a handy tool called the Organizr. It is easy to find – clicking Organize & Create in the main menu takes you to it. With it you can easily add tags, edit titles and descriptions, put photos in sets and collections and more. It’s all really intuitive, but if you want to know how it works I’d recommend reading the Flickr Organizr FAQ. Here are some general advice on flickr organizing:

Tags are keywords that you give your pictures. The beauty of them is that tags are searchable both globally and locally. That is, you can find a specific tag both from ALL Flickr users or a specific tag from just one Flickr user. You can use as many tags as you wish. Separate different tags with a space, and write tags of several words “encapsulated between double quotes”. You can easily create groups of pictures by giving them all a specific label (like so). This is important for non-pro users that have a limited number of sets and is useful when presenting all of the pictures on a forum for instance.
Sets are basically folders with pictures in them. You reach an individual’s sets by first going to his photostream and then clicking on the tab below the name. Again, a free account is limited to creating two sets while pro accounts can create an infinite amount.
Collections are only available to pro users, and are as the name indicates collections of other collections or sets (not both). Think of them as a way to mimic your computer file structure: several folders within folders to create structure. Here’s an example of collections and sets used in tandem to organize Lego pictures. Like sets, the easiest way to reach a persons collections through that persons photostream.

Once you’ve organized your pictures into sets you can create slide shows that you can place on your site. Navigate to a set or tag and locate the slide show button in the top right corner. This creates a slide show that’ll open in full screen. If you press the share button you’ll be able to grab the embed code.

Adding, finding and managing contacts

Flickr wouldn’t be flickr without the great community. Adding people as contacts will enable you to view their photos at a later time (similar to a bookmark) and keep track of new photos as your contacts post them. Additionally, being listed as a contact by others may allow you to comment on or add notes to their photos.

The easiest way to add a contact is to locate their buddy icon. Simply click the drop down arrow next to their icon, and then select Add as a contact?. It’s really that simple. Once you mark someone as a contact, flickr will send them a flickrmail (flickr’s private messaging system) to notify them, and the individual has the option of adding you as a contact as well. Be sure to check your flickrmail as well (the envelope icon in the upper-right corner) to see if people add you as a contact, so you can check out their streams too.

The easiest way to find people is to start browsing photos. If you find someone who has interesting pictures, add them as a contact to subscribe to their photographs. If you want to find a people within a certain niche it’s not a bad idea to identify a few key players within that niche and check out their contact list as well. I’ve done this successfully in three genres: LEGO, low-key photography and character illustration. The result is a constant stream of inspiration and even friends – I’ve met many of my contacts in real life after learning a lot from one another on flickr.

Everyone you mark as a contact will become just that: a contact. You can also designate an individual as a friend or family. These settings are essentially different privacy settings – remember the uploader where you could select to mark a photograph as visible to friends or family? They’re simply different contact groups.

To keep track of your Contacts and to see what they’re posting, all you need to do is navigate to your contacts page. Here you can view the most recent pictures of your contacts. At the bottom, you can opt to see either the most recent picture from each contact or five of their pics. You can have a maximum of 3000 contacts, which should last you a while.

Groups

One of the best ways to explore photos and connect with people is to join and post photos to groups. Any flickr member can start a group, so there are many for you to choose from, each different from the next. The easiest way to start is by opening the Groups menu item in flickr’s primary menu. There you can search for a group, start a new one, or – if you’re already in a few groups – see them or view their recent activity.

If you’re in none, start by searching for a few keywords that you’re interested in. That should bring up a few interesting groups to check out. Some are open for anyone to join, others you need to request an invitation, and other still are private and doesn’t show up in the search at all. A few key factors to look at when you consider joining a group are:

Is the group active? When was the last time someone posted a picture or talked in the discussion boards?
Does the group have any particular rules? They’re usually announced on the front page in a small box or in a stickied forum topic. Make sure you read them and follow them – it makes the intention of the group clear.

Hang around for a while and get a feel for the group. If you like the photos and the people there, join in! Talk to the people there, comment on their photos and discuss in the boards and you’ll learn plenty. And who knows, you might even make a friend in the process!

API tools

Aside from what is offered on the flickr site, many people and organisations have taken their time to put together tools of their own that interact with flickr’s API. Although 3rd party sites are not controlled or maintained by Flickr, most have a steady stream of funding and are quite good. There are heck of a lot of them out there, but some to get you started are…

Motivator: The motivator creates a motivational poster that you can write funny titles and descriptions on.
Mosaic Maker: With the Mosaic Maker you can create a mosaic (a big wall of photos) from your photos or a group pool.
Scout: Scout is used to find the top 500 photos of every day. Flickr has a feature called explore that will show you every day’s most interesting 500 photos. This application allows you to type in a username and find any photos by that user in explore. Some people never get in, some people have over 100 photos in explore. It’s not that big a deal, but interesting nonetheless.
Picnik: Picnik is a photo processing app. It has the basic options of Photoshop and other image software for free in a small package and works really nicely with Flickr (and your Picasa and Facebook accounts).

And that was a brief rundown on how to get started with flickr. There is much more to learn – create things with your photos, place them on a map, view statistics, and much more. See flickr’s own tour, and then explore, learn, and enjoy the application for yourself. If you want to be my contact, I’m Bohman on there.

Others about Flickr

A beginner’s guide to flickr – Elizabeth Halford on Digital Photography School writes about some of the basic functions of flickr. She guides you through your own photostream better than I do, so it’s worth a read!
My three favourite things about flickr – In a guest post on Digital Photography school Jennifer Jacobs share the top three reasons she loves flickr (photo editing, groups and the partnerships with other sites).
How flickr can make you a better photographer – In another great guest article on Digital Photography School Steve Berardi explores how one can use the social and contextual aspects of flickr to develop ones photography.
Why Greg didn’t like flickr – Greg Reinacker explains why flickr wasn’t his choice. This article is from 2005 so not everything in it is applicable today, but it’s refreshing to read why someone didn’t like flickr nonetheless. Everyone else seem to praise the site. Me included, of course

This post started out as an open source collaboration between me, Darkie, Dunechaser, Gladius, Unit 186 and Zachmoe – we set out to document the basics of flickr from a LEGO builder’s perspective. I’ve rewritten it to fit wordpressphoto.net, but I still owe much of this post to these people. Do visit them – they’re great LEGO builders and photographers.