Flickr

Week 3 – Photos & Images

Once I knew we would be getting a choice of 3 of the 23 Things program that we wanted to do, I couldn't go past Flickr. I'm a complete photo maniac. I bought my own digital camera a few years ago and love using it to take photos of whatever, whenever. While I'm a frequent visitor of DeviantArt, I hadn't ever looked at Flickr before and I am shocked at what I could have been doing!

My previous post features one of the photos I have on Flickr (It's my brothers dog, but really she is the most gorgeous thing ever) and I posted it through the Blog feature on the site itself. Also, in my third column you'll see I have a Flickr Photostream which features 10 photos from my account (A gadget VIA Blogger).

I now have 83 photos on Flickr of various things (most are my pets - because I love them so much) and I'm sure I'll use it in the future.

There are many features on Flickr besides just the uploading of your own photos. You can add your photos to 'sets' which leaves you with the option to edit them all at once. Sets usually include photos about the same thing, for example you may have a holiday you have been to. You can then add all those photos to one set and look at only those photos. This feature is helpful for people when searching. If they want some photos of the place where you went on your holiday, they can easily click on that set instead of having to filter through all your photos.

Flickr is a photo-sharing website, so the next feature - Gallery - is made for users who go exploring on the website and find a photo that they love that is another users work. Therefore, you always have them there if you want to go looking at them again or you may like a particular topic. Say, butterflies. Therefore you can go searching on Flickr and find photos of Butterflies and can have them all in one gallery. People may see you like butterflies and want to communicate with you! Galleries can only hve up to 18 photos at once, but you can create multiple galleries.

Another features of Flickr which is quite interesting is the 'Map' Section. The Map section is not Maps of areas, it is a large world map where you can tag particular photos to. Again, I use the holiday example, you could have been on a holiday to France. Therefore you can tag all those photos in France, so people that are looking to go there might see your photos and decide 'I want to go there!' It's a wonderful feature, that has some privacy concerns - for example don't post a picture of your house for obvious reasons. Still, in some situations it'll be quite helpful.

There are other features of Flickr like Tags, that are not exclusive to Flickr so I'll let everyone discover them in their own time. That link will lead you to a FAQ in Flickr which will tell you what a Tag is if you are so inclined.

The Organise and Create tool on Flickr is where all the fun is. Here, you can edit photos, edit dates, add tags and much much more. You can create Photobooks, Photo Collages, photo canvases and more. Creating these products requires payment, though and could be difficult for some people. I'm not quite sure of the specific details and if there is an Australian outlet.

Finally, The Groups feature is where you can meet anyone and join any group you like! For example, the first group I joined was a cocker spaniel group where people talk about their dogs and post all their dogs pictures. It's fun, easy and is quite interesting to see other dogs related to you.

I have realised I just wrote just about a book on Flickr, but I hope you all got something out of what I am writing. I say, Go Join Flickr!