My Tools: Flickr

There are a number of things that I do with my pictures, my main purpose for posting on Flickr could be classified as publishing.

It’s not my backup location for all of my important pictures, though I could view it that way. It’s not the place that I manipulate my pictures, though it could do some of that.

Flickr is the place where I put pictures that I want others to see.

I love taking pictures, and I love for others to be able to see them, and interact around them. As an example you’ll notice that most of the pictures I post on this blog are actually hosted on flickr. I’m actually hoping that people will click on the pictures and interact which has happened on a number of occasions.

There are all sorts of features to flickr and I only use a subset of them, here are a few of the ones I do use:

Sets and Collections

Sets are the place where you put photos that you want to group together – like an album. Collections are groups of sets. I use a number of both. If we go out for a fun day like we did this weekend I’ll create a set for that day and then add it to the Adventures and Days Out collection. Set and collections are both unique to our account.

Groups

Groups are like global sets, or global albums. If you want to highlight a picture to a set of people then putting it into a group is a good way to do it. Anyone is free to create a group, but in many instances it’s likely that a group already exists.

Batch Organize

One of flickr’s most powerful features is the batch Organize capability. What you do is to select a set of photos that you want to work on from the stream at the bottom. Drag and drop them into the middle area and then perform tasks on that set of picture – add tags, add to groups, add to sets, etc. You can even drag them onto a map and set the geotags.

Map and Geotag

Adding a picture to a map sets the geotag for it, showing where it was taken. I try to geotag most of my pictures and the Batch organize capability makes this an easy thing to do. The Yahoo maps used in the system aren’t the best and sometimes it’s difficult to pinpoint where the picture was taken from the.

Creative Commons Licensing

I set the license on all of my pictures to be Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic which allows me to share my pictures with a legal framework to avoid exploitation. I can’t be sure that someone somewhere isn’t breaking my copyright, but I do have experience of it working. I’ve noticed recently that many flickr pictures are set to be All Rights Reserved which I think is a real shame. If you do set the license model to be All Rights Reserved flickr removes the ability for anyone else to download your picture.

Flickr Uploadr

I use the wonderful Uploadr tool to add my pictures to Flickr. This allows me to set all of the meta-data for a picture before it’s uploaded. Once you’ve set up a batch of pictures to upload you I then set it running and forget about it.

Favourites and Comments

I love to receive feedback on my pictures. It’s great to learn from others, and occasionally to receive praise. Adding comments is something that flickr does really well, as is adding pictures to you list of favourites (favorites). This is one of the main reasons that I think flickr has been so successful.

Statistics

If I am being honest I would admit that I spend a bit too much time reading statistics in general. I really like the flickr ones, they are clean and informative. There are some areas where I would like more details, but the ones I have are the most useful ones.

Tags

I use all sorts of tags, some of them are only meaningful to me, I hope no one searches on them expecting to find something useful.

Flickr Blog

I love to read the flickr blog. they are really good at picking different types of pictures. It challenges me to broaden the types of pictures that I take and gives me inspiration to try different things. Now I’m using a digital SLR camera I’m finding some of these things possible and really enjoying the challenge,

I haven’t used the new video feature, I’m a stills man rather than a video man. I’ve not used any of the integrated picture printing services so I’m not in a position to comment on them either.

I’ve used flickr for a long time now, my first picture was posted on 9th December 2004, in Internet terms that’s a lifetime.

Feel free to interact on some of my latest pictures (you can comment on the old ones too if you prefer):