by Carolyn Henry

Created on: September 06, 2009

Flickr.com is one of the most highly regarded and fun to use image sharing websites on the Internet today. The company, when purchased by Yahoo in 2005, and was a simple photo hosting and sharing website, but it has evolved to be much more than that. Whether you are a serious photographer or a blogger who needs a convenient way to store images, you should have a Flickr account.

Flickr offers two basic types of accounts. There is the free account, which at the present time limits the amount of image uploads to 100 MB per calendar month. The pro account, costing less than $25 a year, allows for unlimited uploads, and nearly unlimited ways to organize and share photos, art and other digital images.

Flickr offers flexible sharing and privacy settings. As uploaded images enter the member's photostream, the member has the option of marking them individually as private, visible to friends or family, or public. Members may also indicate whether images are photographs or another type of artwork, and whether they contain content which may be offensive to others. Individual images are also tagged with keywords, making them easy to search. Flickr also has a computerized system which ranks uploaded images according to something called interestingness, and you may be surprised to see which of your photos and images Flickr considers the most interesting. Many bloggers use Flickr as a repository for images which they might use on their blogs.

You can then organize your photos and images into sets. Naming and organizing sets of images is not exactly the same thing as storing photos in folders, since a single picture can belong to more than one set, or to none at all. Pro members can then organize sets into categories.

As a Flickr member, you can browse through the publicly viewable images, sets and categories of other members, either by tags or by interestingness, and you can also leave comments on the images you find. Also, you will definitely want to explore is the multitude of groups which are formed according to every kind of interest. You can search for groups by keyword and you can join as many groups as you like. Members of groups post selected pictures from their photostream in a common group pool, and this facilitates image sharing among members with common interests.

Another great feature of this site is the Flickr Commons. Several museums have looked through their public art collections and have opted to display pieces on which there are no known copyright restrictions. In addition, many Flickr members elect to release some of their images into the site's Creative Commons, granting permission for others to make use of these images under certain specified conditions.

And so for storing, sharing and searching for photos in a fun way, Flickr is an ideal site, and if you enjoy digital images, then you should have a Flickr account and you should explore all the interesting features of this site.

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