An interactive tool for the amateur photographer, Flikcr creates a whole new playground for both beginners and experts on digital photo storage.
Flickr, created by Yahoo presents a home for photographers of all skill levels to post their photos in a community forum. Flickr is based off of the idea of sharing, and allowing others to access photos. While privacy settings allow some posters to restrict access to their photos, Flick “recommends” allowing anyone to access your photos.
The photo site runs off of a series of “tags,” which run on the same concept of “tagging” for any other site and allow users to quickly sift through several thousands of photos in a matter of seconds. By searching for tags on the site, only relevant or “tagged” photos show up on your searches, including people and places.
A global map allows users to put tags on places within feet of their photos, allowing users to search photos by city and region as well. For archiving purposes, this allows a unique way of storing and filing photos, separating them into various sorts of categories. Sure, it’s convenient for some users, but it also raises the question: what if things are tagged wrong? It might not be a national crisis, but still, users make mistakes, right?
Besides the basic download and search functions, Flickr has extended the option of editing photos in Picnik, a free alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop and also allows users to “group” the profiles that they view the most often. In this way, users can easily keep track of friends or other photographers who may have similar styles. With this comes the option of having a contact list, allowing the users to direct message each other about their photos or related things and could be used to contact
I spent some quality time on Flickr over the course of the week, and explored all of its different functions. While setting up an account is a little confusing, the general idea of the site is genius. True, I would like a little more space for my photos (you’re restricted to just 200 MB on your individual photos), but creating multiple accounts can circumvent that. Although previously restricting Flickr access to solely Yahoo users, Google and Facebook users have now been invited access to Flickr, competing with Google’s Picasa.
After playing around with the site, I’ve really got to compliment Flickr for making the site as easy to use as possible. As a newspaper photographer, I have an opportunity to label my photos with titles, add captions, and tag them as many times as I want. Using photos from my archives, I grabbed a bunch of photos from my old high school’s sports and plotted the events at the different locations as well. Now, when users are exploring Manchester, my photos will be included.
This presents interesting opportunities for historians and digital archivists. Because the photos are on a free platform with the ability to be tagged several times, historians have the ability to load photos to the site of important historical happenings—its an easy way to keep track of as many important free-domain photos as possible and a site I would definitely recommend going to check out, whether you’re an amateur or expert photographer.