Hats off to Flickr
Hooray! Last Saturday, I finally found
Flickr. I’ve been searching for some easy and elegant way to share collections of photos with my family and friends. I’m really not an accomplished photographer, but I enjoy experimenting and sharing what I create. I had downloaded half a dozen different clients that attached to photo share services – from Kodak, Nikon, Canon and others. I found them all too structured or too lightweight or too commercial. What I wanted was a simple way to upload a bunch of photos so people could view them as a slide show, or just look, or download individual ones to print — all without without the constraints imposed by the run of the mill services. I had even considered writing my own.
Enter Flickr. I can’t remember where I heard of it – probably in the morass of blogging information I’ve been reading lately. But for me, it clicked.
Have you ever bought something, like a nice car, only to find out later that it had a bunch of really neat things that you hadn’t anticipated? I feel that way about Flickr. I’m still finding neat things in Flickr — offered up with a bit of sass and panache.
I like the way I can
share photos with the public – like you. And I really like the way I can share photos with friends and/or family members on a private basis. For example, without me granting you permission, you can’t see the big album of photos of my son’s high school graduation or the little album of the walk around the neighborhood with my grandson. I like that – permissions based on Identities!
Flickr has groups where I can share my photos or see what others have contributed. Or I can set up my own private or public groups. Alas, the
Identity group had only one member – so I joined and doubled the population. I haven’t figured out yet what photo to contribute.
Tags are wonderful ways for both the sharer to describe a posted photo and a sharee to find something of interest. Of course, I looked up the Identity tag. One interesting thing I found was a set of photos of identity tags for one
Russell Higgs. Quaint.
Then I discovered that if I upload each photo in native size, Flickr will automatically allow me to link to different sizes of the photo for different applications. For example, I uploaded the full image of our friendly neighborhood emu at a size of
816×1224 pixels – which you can download to make a nice little print. But the image to the left is only a web-friendly 67×100 pixels. Flickr did all the sizing for me.
There is much, much more, and I’m sure that I’ll continue to find more great stuff. Maybe you can point out some stuff you know.
I’m Flickr-ing off for now. My photos call.
Tag: Identity