This week I decided to take a look a popular photography and community website you may have heard of before: Flickr. While I’m not sure why the ‘e’ was left out, Flickr is a great place to share your photographs with others while exploring photos from them.

To subscribe to Flickr, use your Yahoo! Sign in. This is free and simple for anyone who doesn’t already have one. There is nothing to download to use Flickr. When you have signed in to Flickr, your first step is to choose your URL. This is the www.flickr.com/photos/*Insert text* that everyone will use to access your photos. Because you cannot change it later, make sure to avoid typos. Then you will see your blank profile page. Your next step of course is to upload some photos.

Free accounts are limited to just 20MB of bandwidth, not storage, per month. You cannot regain space by deleting photos, so your best option is to re-size your pics for the web. A 640×480 jpg is roughly 40kb, giving you plenty of space for low-resolution photos. For those of you with large picture collections and/or high-resolution, high file size photos, you can opt for the Pro Flickr account for 2GB of bandwidth for $25/year. While big-time photographers will want to look at Pro or another web-hosting setup, I felt the Free account gives causal users like myself a way to access all of Flickr’s features, minus the extra space of course.

You can upload via Flickr’s website or download free tools for Windows and Mac that let you tag and upload photos from your computer without logging into the Flickr website. I used the site to upload multiple picture sets and individual shots. When you upload a set of photos, you can add a tag for the entire set, such as “Vacation 2006 Photos” and set your Privacy options if you choose to make your photos private or public. Tags let you organize photos and allows them to be indexed so you and others can search for them. Uploading will be faster if you have a high-speed connection, but dial-up users can still use Flickr, especially with smaller resolution/file size photos. Once the files are online, you can add individual tags, titles and descriptions. Titles will be filled in from the photo’s file name, but you can change them if you need to. When the photos are all set, hit Save and you have successfully entered the world of Flickr. But of course, uploading photos is not all that Flickr is for.

Uploading your photo collection for the world to see is fine, but what to do with a large, diverse collection? Organize it of course. Flickr’s built in Organizer lets you drag and drop photos from your online collection into a virtual work space. From there you can edit tags, rotate, choose who can view/comment/add notes and tags, and edit photo dates. You can edit your photos one by one, work with a particular set of shots, or edit photos from a group of people you belong to, perhaps a club activity.

To aid in the sharing and community feel of Flickr, you can invite your friends to view your photos and to upload theirs to Flickr. Friends will then find out when you or their other Flickr buddies have uploaded a new set of shots so friends from around the globe can keep in touch with everything going on in each others lives. Carry on this friendliness with Groups (public or private) where anyone interested in a certain topic can get to together to share similar photos and chat about their experiences and photography. If groups aren’t for you, use the Search function to find photos of anything you want from travel to art, to parties to sporting events, etc, from any public Flickr account.

Overall Flickr is a community for photographers and anyone who appreciates photography. As that, it succeeds admirably. Flickr has a laid back feel from its simple setup, ease of connecting with others through friends, groups and/or photos. Even a vacation-only photographer like me can enjoy Flickr as a way to explore the world through photography.  www.flickr.com