Flickr

Find your inspiration.

Join the Flickr community, home to tens of billions of photos and 2 million groups.

Flickr – almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world – has two main goals:

1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.

Maybe they want to keep a blog of moments captured on their cameraphone, or maybe they want to show off their best pictures or video to the whole world in a bid for web celebrity. Or maybe they want to securely and privately share photos of their kids with their family across the country. Flickr makes all these things possible and more!

To do this, we want to get photos and video into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users’ home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their content. And we want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven’t thought of yet. What else are we going to use those smart refrigerators for?

2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.

Once you make the switch to digital, it is all too easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer number of photos you take or videos you shoot with that itchy trigger finger. Albums, the principal way people go about organizing things today, are great — until you get to 20 or 30 or 50 of them. They worked in the days of getting rolls of film developed, but the “album” metaphor is in desperate need of a Florida condo and full retirement.

Part of the solution is to make the process of organizing photos or videos collaborative. In Flickr, you can give your friends, family, and other contacts permission to organize your stuff – not just to add comments, but also notes and tags. People like to ooh and ahh, laugh and cry, make wisecracks when sharing photos and videos. Why not give them the ability to do this when they look at them over the internet? And as all this info accretes as metadata, you can find things so much easier later on, since all this info is also searchable.

Flickr continues to evolve in myriad ways, all of which are designed to make it easier and better. Check out the Flickr Blog to stay apprised of the latest developments. The fact that you’ve read to the end of this entire document and are hanging out at the bottom of this page with nothing but this silly text to keep you company is proof of a deep and abiding interest on your part.

Features on Flickr

Like any media platform, Flickr has its own lexicon that is important to understand should you wish to navigate the site with ease. Here are some of the top features/buzzwords to know before creating a Flickr account:

1. Profile

Just like you have a profile on Facebook, you have a profile on Flickr. This dashboard is a place for both you and others to view and/or keep track of your media. As you can see, I have a very developed profile, ie one singular photo of my dog.

2. Galleries

Think of galleries as you would “photo albums” on Facebook.. A key difference between Facebook albums and Flickr’s galleries is that you can add other users’ media to your gallery.

If you really like a certain photographer and wish to showcase their work on your page, you can do so by adding them to your gallery. You can only have 50 photos or videos in a gallery, so take that into consideration before your next Flickr spree!

3. Photostream

Your photostream is a collection of media that belongs solely to you. If your photos and videos have been set to public, then other users can come to your profile and see what you’ve uploaded. If your media is set to private, then only you and those you have permitted will be able to view your content.

4. Albums

One great feature of Flickr is the ability to organize photos through albums. This makes it easy for people to come to your profile and say, “Now where were those Thanksgiving pictures? Oh, here’s the album ‘Thanksgiving 2018.’”

This feature is also a great organization tool for the user, as it helps ensure media isn’t jumbled up or appearing in random places. Professional photographers will especially enjoy these organizational features, as it makes it easy to create specific albums for each client.

5. Faves

When you peruse Flickr, it’s possible you’ll come across an image you really want to save for later: whether to recreate in your own part of the world or just to continue looking at. When you “star” or favorite a photo on Flickr, it automatically appears in the “Faves” tab on your profile.

With this feature, you’re easily able to keep track of inspiring shots and revisit the profiles of photographers you admire.

6. People

It’s fun to have friends, and chances are, many of yours are on Flickr. This platform, which was launched back in 2004, was said to have 87 million registered users as of 2013.

And you can connect with people on this site, just as you would any other social media platform! You can add people directly through Flickr, whose profiles will then show up under your Follower / Following count on your profile.

You can also opt to upload your contact list to Flickr and send invites to friends who don’t have profiles yet. Maybe forego sending a mass invitation though, and instead choose to invite only the friends you know would enjoy uploading and engaging with photography.

7. Stats

Engagement is key on any media platform! Flickr offers statistics as to who is viewing your content, and how they found you. This is especially useful for those who are just starting out and wish to use Flickr as a way to grow their following/brand.

If you want to grow your following organically, consider asking yourself “How Does SEO Work?” By following a few simple “rules” of the internet, you’ll make your profile much easier to find to those who are on the hunt for content like yours.

The facts of Flickr

And those are the facts, folks! To learn more about what Flickr has to offer (we by no means covered it all), I recommend jumping on the site and creating a free profile for yourself. Playing around with various features is always the best way to learn more about a platform.

Plus, this one’s so much fun! Who doesn’t want to scroll through the work of thousands of brilliant photographers from all over the world?

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