Sunday, July 27, 2008

Five Cool Things about Flickr

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What is Flickr?

Flickr is the largest social photo sharing site in the world. Last time I checked, about six million photos are uploaded daily. They offer both free accounts and pro accounts. The cost of a pro account is 24.95 USD, which is a good investment even if you just use it as an online photo storage site. With a Pro account you have unlimited uploads in the original size of your images. You can make your photos public, private or just share them with friends. Well, that is neat, but now for the really cool stuff.

Cool stuff:

1. Flickr has third-party development with generous use of their API. This enables Flickr users to have many resources at their disposal for promoting photos. Perhaps there are thousands of configured uses. Check this out - it is all done from the Flickr API. It is one cool gallery that shows a very professional touch.

To get your free gallery, go to photofront. For a mere ten bucks more you can upgrade to a more flexible use of your gallery. And it is pretty much a lifetime subscription.

2. Another use of the API is that many companies enable you to directly access your photos for products. This greatly streamlines you time because you don't have to re-upload photos to their site.

Two of my favorites are:

Moo
I get my very unique business cards there. A pack of 50 with different pictures on each one!

Blurb
A self-publishing on-demand book store. So far, I have made three books there and the quality is top of the line.

3. The Internet presence of Flickr is huge. This in itself is a great advantage for aspiring photographers who want to be published. Just putting up your photographs and making them public brings offers for use from many necks of the Internet woods. This happens to me and it will happen to you.

4. People constantly ask me what formal training I have had in photography. Well, the truth is I have had none. What has improved my photos the most is seeing what others are doing on Flickr. Flickr has a vast network of socialization through groups, where you can learn to improve your photographs tremendously. Have you ever wanted to talk and learn techniques from the top photographers in the world? Flickr is your opportunity.

5. Do you constantly look through reviews to see what camera you will get? And do you wonder if the reviews will be unbiased? At Flickr you can see what users are doing with their cameras and quickly see the truth in the pudding.

This just scratches the surface of what Flickr has to offer. Start using it yourself and see the benefits.


5 comments:

Robert Miller said...

There are several grammar errors in this post. I tried to re edit the post, but blogger has gone into fits and will not allow me to edit. Please overlook these uncorrectable errors on my part.

1bluecanoe said...

Nice blog...and some info i was not aware of....i'll check back. And your photography rocks :-)

Birdtoes said...

Looks great, Bob!

Anonymous said...

Do you like your Moo cards? I had gotten some as a free trial and I was disappointed by them (but willing to admit the problem was on my end). I also ordered some postcards and wasn't thrilled by those either. I love their product line and wonder if some pictures translate better into the little cards, etc. than others.

I'll keep reading to see if you talk about getting 'standard' prints made.

Robert Miller said...

I had ordered a set of 50 business cards from Moo. I was pretty well pleased with the quality. I have also ordered post cards from them, and thought they turned out fine. I use both the postcards and the business cards as local promotion and they seem to work out well.

The business cards work great you can fan them out to the people you hand them to. Every time I have done this people wanted to look at all the cards and wanted more than one.

The small moo cards, I did not like as much, I thought they were too small and would easily get lost by the customers, and was not happy with cropping my photos so small.