i’ve mentioned flickr already a couple of times and said i’d say more. i actually feel like i have been a bit slow on the uptake. flickr’s been around a while (long enough for jordon to upload 3000 photos anyway!) and i’ve seen plenty of people blog about it. the thing that delayed me was having photoalbums in typepad provided already which are a great feature (see left hand sidebar to link to some of mine).

anyway here’s the deal:
for free you can upload 20mb of photos a month. yes free! the 20mb is bandwidth so to upload plenty resize your photos first.

the interface is great – simple and easy to use. sign up and then upload. my flickr page is here. you can see i haven’t uploaded many yet but the latest are there. when you upload a photo it is resized for you automatically into several sizes. for example click on a photo and then you’ll see above it a little button that says all sizes. if you click on that you can select what size you like. if you sign up as a member you can leave comments on peoples photos. you can also download some tools to make uploading easier – i have downloaded the one for mac which is fab.

when you upload a photo (or after) you can add any tags (yes them again) to the photo. a tag is just a word you want to associate with a photo – add as many as you like to any photo. this is a very powerful way of filing photos for retrieval. so in my photos at a later date i would be able to find all photos of cornwall or the big chill just by searching on that tag, or i could search on a family member’s name and so on. over a period of years this will be invaluable. i can search in this way within my photos or all public photos.

you can organise your photos into sets. this is easy to do. and when you look at a set it creates a very neat slideshow option – brilliant for sharing photos with family and friends by sending an e-mail with the link. here’s a set of snapshots 2005 that i created to share with friends and family at christmas. and here’s a set of some long thin shots that i like.

if your photos are private or you are worried about who can access photos you can choose to make photos just available to people you have indicated are friends and/or family which is neat. i haven’t done this yet but i guess once family members start sharing photos we may want to do that with some photos.

flickr is part of what’s being termed social networking software. in other words it’s not just about you and your photos – it’s about sharing photos with a network of friends and family (and the wider public). so you can invite other people to be your contacts very easily. to do so they need to sign up with flickr. to see the contacts you need to be signed in. i am in the process of persuading some of my  brothers and sisters to sign up so that we can share photos and i have added several friends. whenever i go to the flickr page now i see the latest  photos added by friends and family. i should say my son harry beat me to it – he signed up with flickr before me – see his photos.

within flickr it’s easy to also create groups that have a shared interest on a particular theme. a couple i noticed were banksy – over 700 photos of banksy stencils (or supposed banksy stencils). i will probably join and add my ones to that when i get round to uploading them. there are also discussions within that group. and another weird but fun one is cameratoss – yes photos taken by throwing your camera up in the air often with stunning results. the canadian emerging church/alt worship network resonate have their own group where they share photos for worship, media and graphics. any images are protected by copyright and some people choose to have a creative commons license but they are there to use within that. i haven’t worked out what to do about creative commons and all that yet but i guess i should.

you can upgrade to be a pro user. this gives you unlimited storage (well 2 gig a month) and is cheap. so i have already signed up to that. it means you can upload large images without worrying about it and access your original files. and it creates a backup of all your photos online.

there are other features as well but not much more you need to know. so what are you waiting for?

let me know any cool groups you discover…

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