The most immediate difference you’ll find between Flickr and ordinary image hosting sites is the emphasis on building a community. When you sign up, you’ll be asked to provide information such as your occupation, hometown, interests, and your favorite books, music and movies. You can choose a screen name (which is different from your username) and create a buddy icon that will appear when other people visit your page. Both of these can be changed at any time, so you can personalize your page to a degree.

It’s All About the Photos

You’ll notice your homepage is quite Spartan, with a white background and really no scope for personalization other than your screen name and buddy icon. Some will appreciate the uniform look and feel across users’ homepages that emphasizes their photos rather than the page they’re on. Others would prefer being able to customize the appearance of their own pages. It isn’t known whether the developers plan to introduce this capability in the future.

The first thing to do once you’ve set up your account of course is start uploading pictures! Clicking the Upload Photos link takes you to a page where you can point to five files on your hard drive at a time and upload them in one shot. If you’re going to be using the service heavily, you should check out the Flickr Uploadr, a small downloadable program available for Windows XP and Mac OS X that will help you upload more photos faster.

Once uploaded, your photographs will show up on your home page or “photostream” in descending order. Click each one to enter a brief description that will show up with it when anyone views it, or perform basic actions like posting it to your blog, adding it to a set, rotating it, deleting it or ordering prints online (though this feature is presently limited only to users within the United States). The coolest feature by far, though, is the ability to add “notes” within each picture. This allows you to select a certain region of the photograph and add a text note to it. When a user moves his mouse over that area, the note will pop up briefly!

Flickr allows users to create “sets”, or galleries of photographs that essentially behave like folders, allowing you to categorize them. Each photograph can belong to more than one set, but unfortunately the ability to create “subsets” within sets is missing. Free account holders are limited to having only three sets at a time.

Interestingly, Flickr preserves whatever EXIF data your photographs are embedded with, such as the make and model of camera used, the date and time the photo was taken, the shutter speed and lens aperture settings used as well as tons of other photographic information. This is a great way for people to learn how to take pictures just like the ones they see online and admire.

Once you have your sets defined, it’s easy for you as well as other users who come across your site to dynamically generate a Flash slideshow of the photos in it. You can choose to flip through the photos manually or automatically, set the delay between transitions and also see thumbnails of all the other photos in the set. You can even send the URL of a slideshow page to your friends and relatives if you like.

Taking it Further

It’s easy to find other people with interests similar to yours thanks to the detailed profile information people submit. Based on that, you can form or join Groups, which consist of members who post photographs of similar subjects or styles. There are hundreds of groups, covering fans of a particular camera model to wildlife enthusiasts and computer geeks. Each group displays a common photo pool as well as the work of individual members. Groups are also home to discussion boards and some of them can get quite animated!

Flickr also makes it easy to post your photos to blog services including Blogger, Movable Type and WordPress (but not other common ones like Xanga and MySpace). Tons of tools have been created by third party users that exploit the open API to provide new levels of functionality and customization. They’ve also started support for posting directly from camera phones, and are teaming up with other companies to offer users the ability to have DVD slideshows of their photos delivered to their homes, have customized US postage stamps printed.

Flickr takes online photo sharing to a whole new level, and expands upon the role of the online community. Discover a whole new dimension to sharing your artwork and finding stunningly beautiful photography that others have made.