Thing 9: Flickr

Flickr is one tool that I wished I used more. I have an account, but it has been so long since I've used it that they deactivated my account. After exploring the site again today for a good 25 minutes, I was reminded of the breadth of beautiful work posted by "ordinary folk" taking pictures for fun. Anne Rubin uses Flickr (or at least used to use Flickr last I checked) and she's posted some beautiful pics. I wish I could link you all to her images, but I'm still waiting on my reactivation from Yahoo to fully access the site. I tried searching for her images but was unsuccessful. Anyway, Anne is a brilliant amateur photographer and if I find her photos, I will post in a follow-up blog post for all of you.

One of the things I like about Flickr is the fact that you can use the images of most of the photographers at no charge. So often if I want to use an image here or there, there is a charge to do so, or I get that dreaded "photosearch" inscribed on the image. Blah! While there are certainly some free stock photo sites out there, there seems to be a lot more choice in Flickr. For example, right now I'm very, very hungry, so I searched "food" in the advanced search feature. Well over 250,000 images came up! I've posted one in this blog that I found beautiful and tantalizing! What do you think? Don't you want one of these rolls just looking at them?

This picture was taken by Renata Diem, who is a member of Flickr. She has kindly offered use of her images as long as she is given credit. How easy!

I always store my digital photos on my computer, which works well when I want to use them or send them. However, I can definitely see the benefit of using Flickr to easily share personal photos with family and friends. A good example is a family reunion or any other family party. Instead of emailing people the photos, think of how much easier it would be to email a link to the entire list of people and have them view your images. In addition, they could upload their own photos and tag them the same. That way everyone's images from one event could be easily viewed at one time.

So what's stopping me from doing all of this? Time. It's always time. I need time to upload the photos and tag the photos, which I either don't have time for or don't want to make the time for. Clearly I could filter some of my Facebook Mafia Wars time to something a bit more productive. I just haven't found the drive to put that energy into my photos though.