Today’s thing is part review, and part instruction. Not that I think I’m awesome at flickr, but I’ve been around a little while, so I’ve picked up a few tricks. I’ll outline the pros and cons and throw out a few helpful hints and cool things I’ve found. If you’re considering flickr or any photo site, I hope my words help you decide if you want to check it out for yourself. And if you’re new to flickr, like my folks and The G, maybe I can give you a few pointers.
First a bit of history: There was once a cool online game called Game Neverending. I signed up, along with hundreds of other people, even though it was still in testing stage. It was going to be lots of fun, when they were finished making it. Then all-of-a-sudden, the game designers had a new project, somethign with photos. And the photo project took all their time, and the Game Neverending came to a close.
I personally resisted joining flickr for a while, though I heard great things about it, because I was a little miffed about the game. ;( When I did finally join up, January 2005, I didn’t love it right at first, until I figured a few things out. But after a while, I really learned to love it, and I don’t know what I’d do without it now.
What flickr is, is more than just a place to store your photos online, more than a place to share your photos online, even. It’s about the community of storing and sharing your photos. The community is the part that carried over from the game. You post your photos, you make contacts with other photographers, you leave comments and notes on photos, you join groups, you get inspired!
There are two levels of flickr, the regular and the pro. Regular version allows you only 200 photos and three sets, where as pro level allows you unlimited photos and sets. If you have ‘regular’ and you post more than 200 photos, the extras aren’t deleted, you can only see the last 200, so if you upgrade to pro, they’ll all be there. Regular is plenty fine for a lot of people, &/or for a while. I didn’t get up to 200 photos for almost 2 years, and then I upgraded.
Like anything else, there are definate pros and cons to flickr. I’ll list the cons first: they have put a limit on contacts, though it’s a pretty big number, like 3000, but some people don’t like any limitations. Some people also don’t like Yahoo! and flickr has now completely integrated with it. I’ve always kinda liked Yahoo! so I don’t mind, but if you join now, you will have to get a Yahoo! ID also. The two biggest things I personally don’t like are the layout and the fact that non-members can’t see everything. On the layout, there are a few things that I still have to search for on the site, that I can’t find easily, and that annoys me. I do try to save those certain pages on a bookmark so I can find them, that’s my work-around. On the non-members, you can always give your friends links to your photos, but they won’t be able to look at all sizes or search around without joining up themselves. We are using Rapidflickr to bring our photos to this site so you can see them without joining flickr, but that’s a ‘thing’ for another day...
For the good things: there is a tremendous community sence, if you join in the fun. You can just use flickr as a place to store your photos if you want, but you’ll be missing out, you gotta join some groups*! They make it easy to use your stored photos on our blog or website, that way we’re using their bandwith, not the bandwith we’re paying our host for. Lots of people make cool stuff for flickr, and they are always sharing it, that’s how I created some of the cool photos I’ve posted. And I’d say again, one of the biggest positive things about flickr is that it is a great place to find inspiration!
*You can find a group to inspire your inner photographer, whether it’s self portraits, colors, black and white photos, or sunsets. There are groups for a region or city or state that you live in or have photos of. Contests and games. Babies and parties. Go search anything in the groups on flickr, and see what you can find.
***I was going to put links to several groups here for examples, but it looks like you can't see the groups if you're not a member. So that's on the cons list. But if you decide to join to check it out, do search for fun things in the groups.

Tags: review, photography, web, links