Reflections on a year of flickr

I've now been using the photo sharing website flickr for a little over a year, and since I must soon make the decision whether or not to renew my "pro" account, I've decided to review my time so far.

The core idea of flickr is that people upload photos, with a licence (ranging from "All rights reserved" to the most liberal Creative Commons licences). Various privacy settings allow restrictions on who may see photos. Once uploaded, there are a number of tools for titling, describing, tagging and grouping the photos. A system of groups allows people with a common interest to share experiences and photos and a system of "contacts" allows individuals to track each others photos.

An API (Application Programming Interface) lets third parties writing programs the work with flickr. This include fancy uploaders, geotaggers (which allow you to tag each photo with a map reference, semi-automatically), collage production, badge making, and even professional printing and archiving of the photos.

Most people seem to use flickr in three distinct
ways. Compulsive users seem to upload images about pretty much everything they do, continuously, often from their mobile phone. While this is probably great at capturing social history, unless you already know the person involved intimately it is unlikely to be of short-term interest. Holiday users take many photos of memorable events (parties, weddings and particularly holidays) and bulk-upload them afterwards. These can be great for checking out a holiday destination: when booking my up coming holiday to Kos in Greece I used these kinds of pictures to check out the destination. The metadata attached to these bulk uploads is often poor to middling, since most are tagged with tags that apply to the whole holiday. Regulars upload carefully curated photos (usually daily), which often have extensive descriptions and tagging. Commonly they have been digitally enhanced with photoshop. Regulars form the backbone of most groups.

Some people have complained that flickr is full of pornography, but I've certainly not found it to be. Not that I've particular gone looking. There are certainly a great many artistic nudes of pretty much every flavour imaginable.

I've found that flickr has greatly enhanced both the number and the quality of my photographs. I'm a member of a number of groups, focused primarily on places I've been and things I take photographs of. I've had a number of very useful suggestions about my photographs from people I've never met, including much better ideas for framing, shooting angles and post processing. I've also participated in the deleteme group, especially created as a forum for robust and unvarnished critical feedback, and withered before it.

Largely in light of my flickr activities I upgraded to a Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6, which has substantially greater creative freedom (and zoom) than my previous camera. I am currently contemplating a further upgrade to a digital SLR. The primary new facilities I'm looking for are polarising filters, bounce flash and very long night exposures.

I've done quite a bit of geotagging of my photos, and while I'd ideally like to get an NMEA capable camera such as the Nikon d200 which can record the location of every photo right in the EXIF data of every image, any camera with a decent clock (i.e. all reputable digital cameras) can be used in conjunction with a GPS logger to infer the information using post-processing.

Flickr does have limitations with respect to the viewing of photos. Unlike other systems it always presents images at a fixed range of sizes, on a white background with standard web page dressing and creates square icons of them, cropping potentially important features. The slide shows have a similar (but different) set of limitations. I personally don't find this to be a problem, but plenty of people (mainly those into photography apparently for the pure art side of things) seem to. The flick ideas forum has a pretty compressive list of features which people think are lacking.

flickr sells itself as a photo website, and host of web graphics and icons for the sole purpose of using them to build your own site is will get you kicked off. The key problem is that web graphics and icons are loaded every time any web page on the foreign site is visited, resulting in huge traffic, but not web page hits to flickr. Linking to your photos from your blog is, of course, fine and there are several tools, both built in and third party to help you do this. This blog entry was created using one, in fact.

One on-going problem with flickr is that many users upload images they do not have copyright to. As far as I can tell, this is no more of a problem with flickr than with any other photo sites, and possibly less.

So am I going to pay my renewal? In a flash!

flickr is not the only photo sharing website, but the only one I have used extensively and the only one I have a paid account with. For a full list check out Wikipedia's photo sharing category.