Flickr (Spring 2012)

Back in 2008, we summed up Flickr this way: "Dedication to building photo-sharing communities is what separates Flickr from its peers." That still holds true, but to that I'd add the site's dedication to displaying and organizing your images in the best possible ways. Recent updates to the service further all those goals, with a new view for contacts' photos and a slick new HTML5 Web-based uploader. No other site can match Flickr's depth of interest groups, which cover an amazingly wide range of topics. And, at $24.95 a year for truly unlimited photo uploads, it's a bargain for both online display and backup of your treasured memories or artistic imagery.

You still hear some tech pundits talking about how Yahoo "killed" Flickr. I don't know how you can say a top-50 website with 17 million monthly unique visitors (according to Compete.com) is dead. Today Flickr receives on average over 4,000 photo uploads per minute. That compares with 200 per minute around the time Yahoo acquired the site in 2005. Recently the site announced that it passed 6 billion uploads. On a personal level, I log in nearly every day, and though I don't have the hundreds of contacts some users do, I enjoy fresh images from around the world every time I visit.

While a thriving user community is important, equally important is that Flickr's developers continue to improve its features. In the past two months, we've seen the new Contacts photos page redesign, a new HTML5 Uploadr, and higher-resolution image-viewing pages. Flickr may have been overtaken by Facebook in sheer number of photos shared, but the dominant social network can't match Flickr's presentation, tools, and specifically photo-oriented community features. Evidence for its relevance can be seen in the fact that every photo app I've reviewed, whether a mobile hit like Instagram or a pro tool like Lightroom, has the ability to directly upload to Flickr.

Signup and Setup
You no longer need a Yahoo ID to get a Flickr account; you can use your Facebook or Google account, but of course a Yahoo account still works. At signup, you can choose a screen name, and you can separately set up a custom flickr.com/screen name URL. Once you enter your birthdate, you'll be taken to your home page, where clear instructions tell you the next steps: Personalize your profile, upload photos, and find friends.

Free accounts get 300MB of photos and two video uploads per month, while a $24.99 per year account lifts all limits from uploads and allows HD video display. Keep in mind, though, that as Flickr is primarily a photo sharing site, video uploads are limited to 90 seconds, but the playback quality is higher than on most video sharing sites. Only my paid account allowed a full 10MB, 4770 x 3178 photo to be downloaded, the free account limited it to 2048 pixels on a side.

Uploading
Uploading has gotten much better with Flickr's new HTML5-based Uploadr. I like it even better than some installed photo uploading software. You can drag and drop photo files onto it, and while the upload is happening, you can rotate the photos, add tags, titles, descriptions, people tags, and even choose or create a photo set. You can even magnify any un-uploaded photo for a larger view. Of course, you don't have to use the Web-based Flickr Uploadr, since just about every photo-editing app, from iPhoto to Instagram to Lightroom, can directly upload to the service.

Once you've got some photos uploaded, you'll get your first look at your photostream. This central Flickr concept is simply all the photos you've uploaded in reverse chronological order. You can change the photostream layout to show three columns of thumbnails only, two thumbnail columns plus sets or collections, or a single column of larger images with or without set and collection links at the right. You navigate through a photostream using a small thumbnail control to the right, but one behavior I really appreciate in Flickr is that hitting the left or right arrow key takes you back and forward no matter where you are on the site.

Each photo gets its own page, where you as the uploader can edit its title, description, tags, location, people, and permissions. Sharing buttons are also found here?more on that later. Others viewing your pictures here can add comments (as can you yourself), and click a star to designate it as a favorite (sorry, you can't favorite your own pictures).

Clicking on a photo on its photo page opens it in "lightbox" view?a larger version of the photo with a black background that lets you really enjoy the image without distraction. Flickr recently updated this view to take advantage of higher-res monitors; now a "liquid" view means the image resizes to fit the display size and resolution. From this view you can access several sizes up to full resolution, and download any of them. You can control whether you want to allow others the ability to download, too. Flickr lets you designate photos as all rights reserved or several levels of Creative Commons "some rights reserved" licensing. You can even offer your photos up for Getty Image licensing through Flickr, maybe picking up a few dollars for your efforts.

Photo Sets, Collections, Galleries
Flickr's photo organization offerings may at first seem like overkill: You have photo sets, galleries, and collections, not to mention groups. The first is simply a number of photos you group together, whether from a vacation, event, or some topic. These get an icon to the right of your photostream, and they're pretty much separate photostreams, though you can re-order them to taste. The Organize and Create page lets you do this by dragging thumbnails from the filmstrip view along the bottom of the window.

Collections are simply groups of sets. They get their own compound thumbnails, and they're only available to Pro accounts. A Flickr Gallery lets you collect other people's photos and bring them together in a presentation including your commentary and large presentation on one deep scrolling page. These are limited to 18 photos, in an effort to mimic an actual curated museum show. Some lovely work has been done with these Flickr Galleries, such as Blur(red), Trams, and Beijing, just to point out a few out of thousands. A surprising number use B&W photos exclusively.

If your interest is presenting your photos in more personalized, customized, and designed galleries, you'll be better off with the expensive SmugMug ($40-$150 per year, 3 stars) or the free Tumblr. While Flickr keeps the same basic interface for all users' photos, despite the fact that its lightbox is an excellent view that lets the photo shine, those two alternate sites allow a lot more freedom with backgrounds and formatting.

Tagging, Faces, and Maps
As I noted, you can apply tags and attach names to photos when uploading, but you can add and edit tags on a photo's page, and Flickr remembers all your previous tags, so you can easily click on them to apply to a new photo. Photo programs like iPhoto and Lightroom also can transfer tags to Flickr that you've applied inside the applications. Once your photos are tagged, they'll be more easily searchable by Flickr visitors, and it will be much easier for you to find all those photos that, say, included your cat.

Each of your photos pages has a map to the right of the main image, bidding you to add it to your map. If you don't, other viewers won't see the map. If you do want to add the photo to your map, you click the mini map, and a larger one pops up, onto which you can drag a pointer to the photo. If the image already has location data embedded, as is usually the case for pictures taken with a smart phone, Flickr's map will propose the exact location you actually snapped the picture?try that in Facebook!

Though Flickr does let you assign People tags, the feature is more limited than what you can get in Picasa Web Albums, and even to some extent in Facebook. For starters, there's no face recognition; you simply have to tell Flickr that the picture includes a person. Second, tags can only be of Flickr contacts. In Picasa, if your person isn't a contact in the service, you can simply use any name. You could just use a standard tag for this purpose. Another option, which I usually find annoying but one that seems popular is to add a note?you draw a box on a part of the photo and when a viewer hovers over the photo, text you wrote appears.

Editing in Aviary
Until recently, Flickr integrated with the excellent Web-based Picnik photo editor/enhancer to allow you to make changes to your photos without leaving the site. Since Google bought and shut down Picasa, Flickr has shifted this functionality to another Web photo editor Aviary. Accessible from any photo's Actions menu, Aviary's very basic interface offers autofixes, as well as a decent crop tool, an "orientation" tool that lets you level photos, and a decent selection of Instagram-like effects. ?It's red-eye and blemish correction work fairly well, but if you want a more powerful Web-based photo editor, check out Autodesk's Pixlr.com or Adobe's Photoshop Express either of which can access your Flickr photos. One advantage of Flickr's Aviary, though, is that it doesn't require the Adobe Flash plugin, as most other online photo editors do. This means it will work on the iPad and other Flash-free browsers.

Community
Flickr offers an unequalled number of avenues that further connecting to fellow photo enthusiasts?Groups, contacts, a profile, and even Flickr mail for communicating inside Flickr with your contacts. You can designate any other member as a contact, and further identify them as friends or family. Community is so important to Flickr, that your home page on the site, after greeting you in a different language every day, shows activity for your account?new contacts, newly favorited photos, and new comments on your pictures. This is followed by sections for your Contacts, Groups, and Explore--we'll discuss this way to discovery the wealth of imagery on the site later.

Flickr has updated the display of contacts' photos. Instead of a grid of thumbnails with text surrounded by lots of white space, now you just see the photos in what Flickr calls a "justified" view. The images fit together like a mosaic, with their original aspect ratio maintained. No need to hit a "next page" link, as the view now offers continuous scrolling through all the new images. The redesign is a real improvement, because it's now all about the images.

With well over 10 million Groups, you'd be hard pressed to find a larger selection of photo-based interest groups anywhere. Some groups boast in the tens of thousands of members, and some in the hundred thousands with millions of photos submitted. Topics span an amazing range, from nature and birdwatching to Extar 100 film photography to travel and portraiture. There's a group for every photographic style and taste. By comparison, the most popular SmugMug group I could find had only about 3,000 members.

To help you find photos of interest, there's Explore. This is both a menu choice, and a designation for great photos. Flickr members who want to get lots of exposure for their work covet the Explore designation, which means their photo may be displayed on Flickr's home page, and in a calendar of top favorited photos. The designation is based on "interestingness," which itself is based on tags, comments, clicks, and favorites. Getting your photo "Explored" means you'll get hundreds or thousands of views. The Explore page also shows a tag cloud, popular sets, galleries, and groups.

Sharing
Sharing photos from Flickr is a snap, whether you just want to share via email or post to a social network. Email, Facebook, and Twitter share buttons are right above every photo on the photo page, and hitting the Share dropdown offers the new choice of Pinterest, as well as Tumblr. If that's not enough, a "more choices" link offers Blogger, LiveJournal, and WordPress. You can also grab embed code or the direct link to the photo page.

App Garden
Flickr is extensible with a plugin API, and lots of external sites have also drawn on its API to feed photos that create mashups like the glopho news site and the pixplore world photo navigator. You can discover loads more in Flickr's App Garden. Many take advantage of Flickr's tagging, geolocation, and "interestingness" ratings. The other type of integration possible with Flickr APIs is with external apps. Any app?whether it's of the mobile, Web, or computer flavor?can ask your permission to access your Flickr account to either upload or access photos in your account.

Don't Flick Off Flickr!
If you just want your buddies to see the pictures you took at the beer bash the other night, Facebook is perfectly suited. But if you care at all about digital photography, you owe it to yourself to get stuck into Flickr. Not only will you get a way to display your images to the largest possible number of photo enthusiasts, but you'll get full-resolution image backup, interaction with like-minded photographers, and best of all, the ability to discover and interact with a limitless treasure trove of photography. All this makes Flickr our Editors' Choice for photo sharing sites/services. If your interests lie in rather presenting customized galleries of your work, you may prefer SmugMug or Tumblr.

More Photo Editing Reviews:

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