Introduction

Online photo sharing has taken many forms, but the most interactive and successful of these sites has been Flickr, profiled below:

Flickr

Flickr is a photo sharing site and one of the first Web 2.0 websites.  Flickr was created by Ludicorp in February 2004 (and later acquired by Yahoo in 2005) with the intention of collecting images from the web.  Of course, Flickr’s goals gradually changed and the service shifted to become a repository for user-submitted photos.  Flickr then began adding the features that distinguish it as an “interactive” website.  Flickr.com included interactive technologies, such as tagging, groups, favorites, and “interestingness.”  All of these features have made Flickr a photo sharing superpower, home to two billion photos.

Flickr’s about page lists the site’s two goals.  The first goal is: “We want to help people make their photos available to the people that matter to them.”  Flickr accomplishes this successfully through an array of features.  Users are able to set the privacy levels of their photos.  So Flickr is definitely a powerful resource for the photographer looking to “make it big” on the internet.  Yet it also appeals to the more private user—the person who wants to share photos of vacations, weddings, and everyday life with a smaller circle of friends.

Flickr also facilitates easy uploading.  The most obvious way to upload photos to Flickr is from the Flickr website.  But Flickr also allows uploads from cell phones and other mobile devices, and users can even use their photo storage software on their computer to upload photos.  Along with easy uploading, Flickr has ambitious plans for pushing photos out in as many ways as possible: “on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven't thought of yet.”

Flickr’s second goal is to provide “new ways of organizing photos.”  Flickr acknowledges that many users have thousands of photos that become cumbersome to organize, even in an online environment.  To help with this problem, Flickr provides a number of interactive solutions:

• Users can include photos in albums.  Of course, albums aren’t a flawless technique because they tend to be broadly named and can contain large number of photos.  That said, it’s typically easier to find photos that are subdivided into five albums than to sort through a receptacle of a thousand unsorted photos.
• Users can tag photos by keyword.  For example, a photo from Mary’s soccer game might be tagged with “soccer” “Mary” and “goal.”  A photo from a wedding may receive tags of “wedding,” and the names of the bride and groom.  Yet if the photos are tagged well, wedding photos can be further simplified.  If some photos are tagged “reception” and others “service,” it becomes even easier to subdivide your photos into more manageable categories.
• Users can decide who sees what photos.  As mentioned above, Flickr allows the user to customize who is able to see certain photos.  Flickr recognizes that some photos might be best suited for public sharing—perhaps a particularly beautiful sunset or an unexpected celebrity shot—but photos of children and events are best confined to a circle of friends and family.  Thus, photos can be “public” or they can be private, such that only certain users (or even only you!) can see them.
• “Interestingness.”  Sites, such as Google, create algorithms to compute the popularity of certain web sites.  Flickr does the same thing with photos with “interestingness.”  Flickr explains interestingness here: “There are lots of things that make a photo 'interesting' (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.”
• Comments and notes.  Viewers to your photos can react to your photos online as they do in person by using comments and notes.  These enable people from all over the world to provide feedback, compliment you on your work, and share tips.  On a more personal level, this also allows family and friends to easily react to your photos as they would in person.  As Flickr explains, “People like to ooh and ahh, laugh and cry, make wisecracks when sharing photos. Why not give them the ability to do this when they look at them over the internet? And as all this info accretes around the photos as metadata, you can find them so much easier later on, since all this info is also searchable.”

You may be thinking to yourself, “This sounds great, but the whole idea of albums, tags, interestingness, notes, and comments seems overwhelming and time consuming.”  But remember that albums have always been a basic component of photo storage.  It’s simple enough to upload similar photos to an album.  Tagging can indeed be time consuming, but here is where Flickr’s interactivity comes into play.  Friends and family—or anyone you give permission to—can also tag your photos.  By allowing others to help you out, you achieve the most comprehensive tagging system possible.

Finally, it is important to remember the whole purpose of Flickr.  Flickr is not like other sites that are merely a repository for your photos.  Perhaps the best way to compare Flickr to other photo sharing sites is this: some sites are the equivalent of “boxes” for your photos; Flickr essentially frames them and puts them on display.  And with two billion photos, many coming from accomplished and skillful photographers, you’re bound to find something interesting!

To be sure, Flickr is not the only photo sharing site out there.  Sites that were traditionally viewed as repositories for photos (such as Photobucket), are increasingly trying to socialize and become more interactive.  Meanwhile, competitors to the Yahoo-owned Flickr have developed, including Google’s Picassa Web Albums.  Picassa also utilizes tagging, albums, and the option of making albums private or public.  However, it has not acquired the same extensive user base as Flickr.