Newbie basics: sharing and community
Sharing. Flickr is all about sharing. The reason it has tagging and notating features is so other people can find and make sense of your photos. Flickr gives you quite a few sharing options, but maybe the handiest is the embed option, which lets you paste thumbnail previews into forums, blogs, and social networking profiles like MySpace. To get the code, just click on the 'all sizes' button above a picture (note: if you can't see this option on someone else's photo, they're likely a free member or they are restricting people from getting the higher resolutions of a shot.) Flickr will offer different resolutions of any shot you've uploaded. We recommend sharing the "large" size, as "regular" (which is bigger) is usually too big for the average person's computer monitor. If you want to play it safe, send a link to the just the picture, it's in the box below the embed code. For shots that aren't yours, you can copy and paste the URL from your address bar and put it in an e-mail or instant messaging conversation.
Advanced Sharing Tidbit: Want to share some of your recent shots on a blog or Web site, but don't want to go deal with the hassle of copying and pasting the embed code each time? Make a Flickr Badge! A Flickr Badge is a small embeddable picture viewer that showcases your latest pictures, an entire set, or just pictures with particular tags. To make one click here. You can pick HTML, which will work with any Web site, or Flash, which will show up for anyone who has Adobe's Flash player installed. We recommend Flash as it takes up less space and looks a lot cooler. Follow the steps, picking out the photos and colours you want until you get to the embed code, which you can simply copy and paste wherever you plan on showing off your photos.
Flickr Community. Sharing photos is neat, but half of the fun of these photo hosting services is seeing what other people are taking pictures of and interacting with them. The biggest draws to Flickr's community are groups, which let users create and contribute to themed groups. Each group has a shared pool of pictures that any of its members can contribute to. There could be a theme, or maybe no theme at all, it's up to the user. Each group gets its own forum for chatting about topics or individual pictures. It's almost like book club, but for pictures. To join any group, just click the 'join this group' button on the right side of the page.
To contribute your own photos just click the 'send to group' button above a picture (just like adding it to a set). You'll then get the option to select whatever group you're a member of in a drop-down list.
Participating in forums and group discussions is also really easy. If you're signed in to Flickr, just click the "Post a new topic" link. You can also reply to someone's topic by typing in the reply box at the bottom of the discussion. If you find a particularly amusing or noteworthy post that you want to send to someone else, click the 'permalink' at the end of their post. You can then copy this from your browser's address bar, or just right click the permalink and choose 'copy link location.'
Your contact list shows name, user icon, location, and how many photos each user has.
Contacts. Flickr's community is a social network of sorts. You can make friends (Flickr calls them 'contacts') and track their newest photos. When you want to make another Flickr user a contact, just click on their name. This will take you to their photos page. After that, just click on "Add USERNAME as a contact" in the upper right hand corner. Before sending the person the invite, Flickr gives you the option to mark them as a friend or family member. You can skip this, but you might find it helpful if you intend on sorting your contact's photos en masse later on.
Advanced contacts tidbit: If you want to see your friends' newest photos without having to check the site, subscribe to the contacts RSS feed. Just click on the contacts button from the main menu at the top of your screen, and scroll down near the end of the page where you'll see an orange RSS feed icon. You can either click this to view the feed (if your browser supports RSS), or copy and paste it into your favourite RSS reader.
Free vs. Pro
The free version of Flickr comes with a pretty generous upload limit at 100 MB per month, but the devil's in the details. You can only have three sets, and there's no access to the full-size versions of your photos. Keep in mind this isn't a bad thing if you intend on sharing casual party shots to friends, but if you're serious about sharing your work in its original resolution, it's worth the upgrade. Flickr's pro service is arguably a better deal compared to the competition. US$24.95 a year gets you unlimited storage, uploading, bandwidth, albums, and an ad-free experience for you and your users. Many popular photo services like Photobucket, Webshots, and even Flickr's sister service Yahoo Photos place limitations on uploading and storage. The bottom line is that if you find yourself getting capped by the free member limits, it's worth forking over a little cash for the upgrade.
Going Further
Once you've mastered the basic skills of uploading, organising and sharing, there are a ton of things to do with your photos. Flickr opened up the guts of its service to other Web developers, and there are many interesting mash-ups that can use Flickr images. One of our favourites is Zazzle, a service that creates first-class postage stamps from your photos to use on regular mail (US only). They also make calendars, mugs, T-shirts and hats -- the kind of things you used to have to go to the shopping centre to get. Also cool: mini cards from Moo. These tiny, customisable business cards are printed with your selection of up to 100 different pictures (Moo card owners even have their own Flickr group for showing off their creations.)
Notable Flickr users:
- Dave Gorman. British comedian and avid photographer.
- Rosie O'donnell. Actress, TV Personality.
- Hamad Darwish. Flickr user picked by Microsoft to shoot photos for desktop backgrounds in Windows Vista.
- Major Nelson. Microsoft's Larry Hyrb is a big blogger for Xbox, Microsoft's gaming platform. You can usually catch some neat shots from gaming events, as well as up close shots of shiny new gadgets before they're out.
- Ulterior Epicure. Hungry? This fellow has 186 (and counting) sets dedicated to taking high resolution photographs of gourmet food. Try not to eat your screen.
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