The Hartford Courant
January 09, 2006 06:56 am
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Legions of digital camera owners like you took scads of photos during the holiday season. So now what to do with them?
Emailing photos to friends and family is a chore. Digital photos are typically large data files that are time-consuming to upload and download, even with broadband connections. What’s more, many e-mail systems choke on big file attachments.
You might burn them to a CD-ROM and send the disc via postal snail mail. But that, too, is time-consuming, not to mention expensive. Cost and complication also make it unlikely you’d build your own Web site just to share photos online.
An exciting alternative to all this hassle is offered by a photo-sharing Web site called Flickr (www.flickr.com), which was recently acquired by Yahoo!
The site gives users free space for uploading digital photographs and complete control of who can view them. Users can share images with any other Flickr user by making them “public,’’ or they can limit viewing to friends or family members.
Flickr is hardly the only photo-sharing site on the Web, but it’s certainly one of the most intriguing and flexible.
Among its sharing features are search and blogging capabilities. And its association with Yahoo! means that millions of people who already have Yahoo! accounts have ready access to the site, making the sharing of photos easier.
Think of Flickr as a giant online photo album for you to store your digital images.
You can organize this collection into sub-groupings or “sets,’’ assign “tags’’ or keywords to your photos, add photo titles and captions and even view the whole archive chronologically.
Uploading is reasonably easy, especially if you’re making entire folders of photos, rather than picking and choosing individual images. If you keep all your photos in one place on your hard drive, you can upload them all in a single batch, if you like. (Note: Uploads on free Flickr accounts are limited to 20 megabytes per month. If you need more space, wait another month, or upgrade to the Flickr Pro account, which offers a 2 gigabyte-per-month upload capacity for $24.95 a year.)
But Flickr’s real power is in the sharing. Because your photos are now online, you can show them to virtually anyone anywhere — as long as that person has access to the World Wide Web.
First, however, they’ll have to join Flickr. These friends and family members won’t have to upload photographs of their own. But the creation of a Flickr account for them is necessary so that you can control who can see your photos and who cannot.
Fortunately, creating an account takes only a minute or two. You don’t have to disclose a lot of personal information, and you could always fib if you’re worried about privacy.
In no time, grandma will be jumping on the Web to view your photos of Christmas morning, and you’ll be sharing your vacation photos with envious friends around the country.
If you want to take the sharing a step further, throw open the doors of your photo archive to the broader Flickr community. Thousands of users have already done so, creating a vibrant community of people who take photos and people who enjoy looking at them.
Some of the images online are truly eye-popping. They range from landscapes and portraits to accident photos and images from historical events. The built-in search function helps you locate photos that suit your interests.
Be aware that anyone who can see your photos can also download them, though they’ll typically only get a lower-resolution copy of the original that wouldn’t be suitable for printing but could easily be e-mailed around or posted elsewhere on the Web.
In some cases, you can even comment on photos — adding an “attaboy’’ for ones you like, or offering further information about a scene or event that you recognize.
Flickr is still in test mode, and sometimes its servers are burdened by the crush of visitors and photos it is handling. But for free online photo-sharing, it’s hard to beat the site’s combination of features and flexibility.
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