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Flickr - almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world - has two main goals:
1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
Maybe they want to keep a blog of moments captured on their cameraphone, or maybe they want to show off their best pictures to the whole world in a bid for web celebrity. Or maybe they want to securely and privately share photos of their kids with their family across the country. Flickr makes all these things possible and more!
To do this, we want to get photos into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users' home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their photos. And we want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven't thought of yet. What else are we going to use those smart refrigerators for?
Flickr is the WD-40 that makes it easy to get photos from one person to another in whatever way they want.
2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos.
Once you make the switch to digital, it is all too easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer number of photos you take with that itchy trigger finger. Albums, the principal way people go about organizing photos today, are great -- until you get to 20 or 30 or 50 of them. They worked in the days of getting rolls of film developed, but the "album" metaphor is in desperate need of a Florida condo and full retirement.
Part of the solution is to make the process of organizing photos collaborative. In Flickr, you can give your friends, family, and other contacts permission to organize your photos - not just to add comments, but also notes and tags. People like to ooh and ahh, laugh and cry, make wisecracks when sharing photos. Why not give them the ability to do this when they look at them over the internet? And as all this info accretes around the photos as metadata, you can find them so much easier later on, since all this info is also searchable.
Flickr continues to evolve in myriad ways, all of which are designed to make it easier and better. Check out the Flickr Blog to stay apprised of the latest developments. The fact that you've read to the end of this entire document and are hanging out at the bottom of this page with nothing but this silly text to keep you company is proof of a deep and abiding interest on your part. What are you waiting for? Sign up now!
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Review by: tucker (Karl)
Dated: 10th of May, 2005
I have never been one to have all my photos splashed all over the net for anyone to see, however lately I have found myself not only writing an online blog, but now getting the urge to share some of the more 'out there' sights I see in my travels. Garden planters made from neon-pink manequins, high-tech microwave towers in the middle of a cow field, $895 pizza deals billboards... it's all grist for the SoH mill.
So when I was introduced to flickr by a friend who is a self-admitted 'digicam addict' I thought it might be a good idea. After all, I have better uses for my personal webspace than filling it up with gigs of photos. After all, to fit them all in, they would have to be so small as to lose the impact.
So, a quick sign-up (though I feel there were a lot of extra questions that really could have been left until after the main signup process) later and I had a basic account. Total cost, FREE. Limitation: 20megs per day upload limit, will only display the last 200 pics, minimal tools available. However, with the us$30/yr upgrade to Pro level, all boundaries are blown to the wind. 2gig per day upload, no limits on display quantity, unlimited photogroups, batch-processing tools, uploader-assist tools you can download... wonderful stuff!
I uploaded a sampling of 30 photos and proceeded to create a number of PhotoGroups. These are akin to photo albums, but the same photo can be put into any number of collections. Metadata tags can be added, making massive wildcard searches possible, themed searches, etc. With much shuffling, I finally had all the pix grouped and context-linked. And the best bit... even at dial-up speeds it was fast, and the GUI is drag-n-drop, driven by Shockwave. So easy to use!
So why the low scores in places? Simple... navigating is a pain in the butt in places. Trying to track down a user to add as a contact can be a nightmare and the URLs generated are all over the place. One contact on mine had a direct-dial URL of www.flickr.com/photos/[her username] whereas mine was www.flickr.com/photos/[a string of 12 random characters] - totally unrecognisable and difficult to remember or pass on to friends and family. ADMIN NOTE: The option to set your own 'personal URL' has now been clearly presented to members upon login. Well done Flickr!
Overall, I was quite impressed... and since I am planning to build my own PHP-driven photoalbum one day, I will be taking notes from flickr, since they are indeed the premiere online photoblogging service so far. Keep at it folks, clean up the layout a bit, deal with some of the confusing navigation issues, and you'll be forever sitting atop the heap!
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