Flickr

Changing the Way We Do Photos

By Rino Svaldi

We have all heard the familiar saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but for some of us, our pictures could in fact be considered priceless. When it comes to addressing the challenges of storing, organizing, sharing and safeguarding the pictures we hold dear, photo sharing websites like Flickr can offer some very practical and significant advantages compared to more conventional methods.

With the onset of digital photography and advancements in home computer technology, we are able to take and store more photos than ever before. Trying to organize our collection the old fashioned way with hard bound albums and scrapbooks is labor intensive and quite impractical, especially for digital images. While storing photos on our computer or burning them on discs seems a practical approach, this still leaves us vulnerable to certain mishaps. Computers can crash, erasing our precious memories with them. Discs can easily be misplaced or mislabeled. In the event of a catastrophe such as a fire or flood, neither hard drives nor hard copies, can do much to prevent the permanent loss of our beloved photos.

Here’s where a photo sharing website like Flickr can really offer a sensible alternative. Let’s begin with storage. Flickr offers unlimited capacity to store as many photos as you wish. They offer a wide variety of web based and email uploading options, including straight off your camera phone, and support several different formats, the preferred being JPEG. Although Flickr offers almost all of its services at no initial cost, free accounts are limited to uploading no more than 100MB per month and you can only view your 200 most recently stored photos at any given time. For unlimited access, you must purchase an upgraded account at a cost of $24.95 per year. An added bonus to storing our photos on Flickr is the fact that we’ve now created a reliable, off-site back up to safeguard our treasured photos in the event of an unforeseen mishap or catastrophe.

There are a number of software products available today that can help us do an adequate job of organizing our photo collection, but with Flickr, we can invite our family and friends to help with the process as well. Photos can be viewed as a photostream, slideshow or grouped into sets. Sets can then be combined to form albums complete with dates, tags, and labels for easy reference along with whatever comments we or others we invite wish to make. That brings us to the issue of security. Flickr gives complete control to the account holder as to who can and cannot view their photos by offering a wide range of customizable privacy settings. Furthermore, Flickr provides several copyrighting options to help protect your photos from being unlawfully reproduced or exploited.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Flickr is, the unique opportunities it provides for sharing our photos with others. We have always been able to show our photos to others, but usually that means they must be there present with us, in the same place or room. Flickr allows any relative or friend with the proper clearance, to meander through our saved photos from anywhere and at any time they like. We could even share certain photos with the whole community at large, if we so desire. There are countless groups we can join as well, that center on specific interests like travel or sports, or if nothing should strike our fancy, we can always start up a new group of our own. This creates a wide range of social opportunities that we would not otherwise have access to. The fact that Flickr allows members to post comments and blog with others means we can communicate our personal thoughts regarding shared photos or interests while appreciating the thoughts and comments from others as well.

If there are any drawbacks to this website, it would mostly revolve around the issue of privacy. For example, someone could accidentally make public a photo or photos they intended to keep private. Even if the error is corrected, once a photo has been made public, it may be impossible to retract completely, as someone may have already downloaded it or posted it on another website. Another possible drawback could be that, because Flickr is web based, it could potentially alienate those among our circle of family and friends who are shall we say, less than computer literate or for that matter, don’t have access to a computer to begin with.

Although this summary merely offers a general overview of some key aspects regarding the photo sharing website Flickr, one thing is certain. Flickr can clearly be considered an extremely useful and versatile tool for anyone who enjoys collecting and sharing photos.