Flickr started in Vancouver, BC

I want to introduce you all to my favorite place on the web ever, just one of the zillions of web resources for inspiration and ideas: Flickr. In case you haven't seen Flickr yet, you can get there by clicking the word "Flickr" wherever I have made it bold ... it's a hotlink to either my flickr page or someone else's Flickr (Skuz is Gabe) photo page. Flickr is awesome. It's a fantastic idea that grew out of the desire of a group of Vancouver friends to easily share their photos with each other online.

From a small group of amateur photographers a little over two years ago, Flickr has grown to millions of members all over the world. You can sign up for a free account, or you can pay a very reasonable annual charge for a "Pro" account, which allows you to upload an almost unlimited # of photos and make sets (albums) to organize your photos. I have a pro account. I started in the summer of 2004 with a free account. But within 6 months knew I wanted a paid account. It's definitely worth the money!!! You can do so many cool things with your flickr photos, like these calendar pages I made (free, and automatically in about 10 seconds, using Flickr tools)



I highly encourage any of you who want a super easy way to store your photos online (so you don't have to have them on your computer hard drive anymore) to check it out. But Flickr isn't just online photo storage as most other online photo sites are. The following is from a Newsweek article:

On Flickr, you can choose to make your photos either public or private (but more than 80 percent of the millions of photos are public.) You can annotate your pictures, adding captions within the frame, or post comments below other users’ photos. Most significantly, you can append “tags,” adjectives that describe the photo’s category (such as “dog,” “poodle,” “cute”). Then all of the photos that share a particular tag can themselves be explored as a group, which online pundits call a “folksonomy.”

The result is something that approaches a vast theater of collective performance art. Various groups on Flickr are devoted to photo collections of confusing street signs, mannequins and Halloween costumes. There’s a group devoted to pictures of dogs, naturally, but there’s also a group devoted to pictures of dogs’ noses. One popular thread includes photos of circular objects framed within squares. (Caterina) Fake(one of Flickr's founders) says that the best part of the service is finding like-minded shutterbugs and getting recognition for your art. “There’s a real magic to getting reactions to the work you’ve done,” she says. -- Newsweek March 11, 2005

Many of our family members have free online photo albums. Aunt Jeanie has a Kodak Photo Album site. Tim and I both still have our Sony Imagestation photo accounts, I have my landscape design albums at PictureTrail. I think Mark has one somewhere but I don't get invitations to see your photos, Mark so I don't know where it is. Mom has an Imagestation account I think (don't you Mom?) And there there is Photobucket, Shutterfly, Fotolog, etc.etc.

When I signed up for Flickr I was just going to use it casually and I didn't want to give up my other accounts just in case it didn't work out. Well I rarely use my other accounts anymore. It's been almost a year since I put any new photos on either Imagestation or PictureTrail. I'm going to close those accounts as soon as I can easily transfer my photos from there to Flickr (the flickr folks are working on that.)

In the meantime, if you want to continue with our family blog ... and want it to be even easier to share and post photos either here or anyway on the web, consider signing up for a free Flickr account and trying it. You may decide, like I did, you like it so much you want a paid account. Or you can keep your free account indefinitely.

I'll write more on flickr in the future. Can you tell I really like it?
Love, Maureen