Fun with Flickr

There are lots of sites out there for sharing photos with family and friends. I’ve studiously avoided most of them simply because I don’t want to have to manage a different utility for everyone who wants to show me some photographs that I’ll probably only view once and then forget. Yeah, a tad cynical, I know. But what is missing in most of these photo-share sites is any sense of interaction.

That’s all changed with Flickr. There are the standard features that let you title and describe your photographs and group them together into photosets. But there are also the interactive and organizational features that I’ve missed elsewhere, such as tags and comments and the ability for the user to view photos by most “favorited”, most comments, and most “interesting”. In addition, bloggers can send photos to their blog. One of the truly cool features is the ability to notate individual photographs with tags and comments. But Flickr’s implementation lets you scroll and tag specific areas of the photograph. The user then moves their pointing device around the photograph to find the “hotspots” with comments and tags.

When you invite friends or family members to view your photo sets, the invitation automatically gives your contact the ability to have their own account or simply to see and post comments on your photos.