Feature: Yahoo hit upon a winner with Flickr.com, its Photo Gallery website
Motivation: Reasons for using the website can be quite diverse

There must dozens of free gallery websites - what can possibly set Yahoo's Flickr.com from the rest beyond the curious name. Well lets step back a bit and look at the big digital picture. One of the unsolved problems of digital imagery is the fact that there is no archival back-up mechanism for your images. If you think storing your digital images on a CD will last for 20 years you are seriously wrong. Many photo colleagues are reporting that CDs filled with .jpg and/or .tiff images just 2-3 years ago and stored safely in dry, stable temperature environs away from light, have turned up blank. Yes, they are unable to read the images - and unless they had secondary or tertiary backups - they were lost forever. And DVD's are only a notch better - 3-4 years is the story so far. Archival storage of digital images is the number one problem facing the digital photography industry.

So How does Flickr Help ?

So I use Flickr as my third repository for digital images. My primary backup is 2 x 200GB Maxtor drives which have duplicate directories of all my images to date. My second repository is one copy of each image to 3 different DVDs. And the third repository of a selected subset of images, the ones I have immediately processed for display, is stored on Flickr. So the first reason I use Flickr is as a tertiary, off-site backup for my most valued photo images.

However, if you want to try out Flickr or just share a few dozen images with friends, the Free Flickr account is more than equal to the task. You get all of the same services and features of the Pro Account including Tags, Groups, Contacts, Sets, and powerful Upload tools. The only limitation as you can see in the screenshot above is in the amount of uploads you can make in a month (20MB of images); the number of personal sets (or collection of images) you can have is 3 in total; and the total number of images that can be displayed/viewed at anyone time is (200 images in total). For many people the Free or Standard Account is more than good enough because the contacts and groups features allows them to share images with family and friends very easily - which is the whole purpose of a Web gallery.

But for pro photographers and artists, Flickr has many more attractions. Flickr goes beyond the ordinary in sharing images, organizing them and interacting with friends, family and other photographers. Here in order are the top 5 features from this photofinishers viewpoint.

Contacts

Every image you store on Flickr is either Private or Public. If at time of upload you make it Private then it will only be viewable by yourself, your family, and your friends. And you can restrict Private images to being viewable only by family or only by friends. I store all my raw images in a set called Raw and for private viewing only.

But the screenshot above shows what Flickr does automatically for you - it shows thumbnails of the latest pictures uploaded by friends and family plus other contacts you have made at Flickr. So this means you can see what others are doing and just by clicking on an image go to their gallery and see their current images (or photostream as Flickr calls them). This is one of the winning features of Flickr because it enables one to follow whats happening among family and friends with a simple click on the Your Contacts menu item at the top left of most Flickr screens.

Organizing your Images

Organizing your images is one of the key features of online photo galleries. Many galleries allow users to add, delete and change the order of their images. Note that Flickr does not allow you to change the order of the images uploaded except through Sets. The base method of organizatin is the time stream of when the photos are uploaded. But few online galleries allow users to organize their photos into sets or collections. As you can see, sets allow users to establish photo themes and the adding, deleting and changing the order of images in a set is very easy to do. Also remember the Standard Account allows only three sets while the Pro Account allows an unlimited number of sets.

The screenshot above shows Flickr's Organizer in action. As noted the base line for organizing images in the Flickr gallery is the date when they were uploaded - however; Flickr know all about the EXIF data associated with digital images and does allow images to be sorted by the date taken (see the check box in the lower left of the screenshot). Also note that you can use the timeline knobs at the bottom of the screen to adjust what date interval of images is to be displayed in the organizer. When you have hundreds of images, this ability to bracket the images displayed is a real time saver. But there are other time savers as seen in the screenshot below for organizing Sets.

In this screenshot, two operations have been done on the base Organizer setup. First, we have clicked on the batch operations menu item on the bottom of the initial screen. Next we clicked on the Open set page menu item on the top right of the Your Sets tab.

Batch operations allows us to add a whole group of images to a Set. Or users can delete the images from their gallery all together (there is no recovery from this operation except to upload the photos again - so be careful). As well you can change permissions - make Private images Public or allow friend to see images as well as family. batch operations are big time savers and work almost as fast as desktop systems.

On the right side of the screenshot, is the panel devoted to editing a set. First, users can quickly add a whole group of images to a set. Next by dragging and dropping a thumbnail to the trashcan one can delete images from the Set. Finally, drag and drop also allows users to reposition the appearance of images in a Set.

Sets are one of the major ways to organize your photos in Flickr. An image can belong to several sets. However, you cannot embed a Set within another Set. But you can change the order of appearance of your sets on Your Page as seen in the screenshot below.

Your Page is the start of your gallery images. note that the sets 1Olympics and UofT Fall are at the top of the page - because in the Set Tab I determined the order of the Sets using the rearrange them menu command. Also note that it is easy to add a description to an image (see the click here to add a description prompt). Also you can quickly change the properties of an individual image including deleting it. So Your Page is the place to go to see how your images are presented to friends and family.

Also note two menu items in the lower right of the page. Calendar brings up a display of your images in calendar order and allows you to quickly find and browse through your images. Your tags brings up the other means of organizing your images - the use of tags. Each image can have an unlimited set of tags or named descriptors to help identify and sort through your images. The screenshot below shows an example of how Tags are used by Flickr.

I am searching for olympic pictures - so I enter "olympics" in the Search field and Flickr comes up with a big dump of all images tagged with "olympics". I want to refine that dump and so I ask Flickr to cluster the tags into logical groups (yes they use statistical methods). And the result is a much more informed grouping of images any of which I can explore just by clicking on any of the thumbnails in the cluster. This is an extremely powerful yet easy to use feature in Flickr - excellent work.

In sum, Flickr offers a number of features for organizing your image that goes well beyond most free web gallery sites. However, there is another feature that has to be considered that adds a distinctive touch to Flickr. It is the people that Flickr has managed to attract.

The People page shown above demonstrates the diversity of contacts that users can make with other photographers around the world. This is a sample of 14 from the 70 contacts I have managed to make in a half year at Flickr. Contacts and their photos make for a great exchange of ideas and image impressions as you can visit their Gallery pages in many interesting ways. One of the most fruitful is through the Groups mechanism - a Group is just a set of images open to either the public or an invited series of members of Flickr.

Any Flickr member can start their own group. Any Flickr member can join any public group and the bulk of Groups on Flickr are public. Once a member of a group you can participate in discussions in the group or add photos to the Groups collection of images. The diversity of groups is quite wide and covers every thing from Image Manipulations to Toronto[one photo per day]. I manage or administer 7 groups including Flowers of Passion, High Key Haiku (a picture with a haiku poem is required here), Olympic Art (where the emphasis is on Olympic images which have been combined into collages, montages or manually derived art).

Groups are where you can discuss B+W processing techniques, events in Soho, or styles of bordering and photofinishing. I personally like the First Thoughts group. For every image you enter there you must provide your first thoughts on the previous 3 or more images. I find that is where I get some of the most candid and useful comments on images I have done beyond the specialized groups. In general, if you want to meet people doing specific types or methods of photography - Groups are one of the best ways to find out more about what is happening.

Okay, Flickr is not perfect. Lately, because of the great and growing ppularity of the system it has seen outages - about three times a week in the past month, although the move to new hardware appears to have stabilized that problem. Second, there is on-board facility to make even simple image corrections - rotations, contrast, cropping, brightness must be done before upload. Finally, it would be nice to include sets within sets for organizing purposes.

But even with just a quick run through, it is easy to see that the Flickr gallery system is packed wit features. For free family and friend interaction, Flickr is hard to beat because all of the advanced features are available to Free Accounts. But if you value the ability to organize and display your work to audiences and groups with similar interests - Flickr is indispensable. Bill Gav in the retouch groups has wonderful images and descriptions of methods. JulieS, Anna, Steph have done impeccable macro flower work in various Flowers groups. And Shabok and SSutherland just dazzle the eye with their great dance shots. And artists like Eglantine, 10thAvenue, Critterranch, ZonePatcher have on display a wonderful diversity of works. In sum if you are image-creatively inclined - both traditional media or photographs - Flickr is the place to be.