Flickr Stuff

I've been using Flickr for a few years now and I love it. My folks and a few friends are on a dialup connection (still), so instead of resizing my photos or jamming up their inboxes, I can send them a link to my Flickr page and they can browse, comment, and even print the photos at their leisure. And I'm all about leisure.

There are some ways to make Flickr even more useful. First, rather than upload pictures through the web site Uploadr, I installed the software. By doing that, it adds a right-click menu option, so anytime you're looking at one of your photos (in Windows Photo and Fax viewer, for instance), you can right-click it and select "add to Flickr". This make the upload thing so much easier. Plus, you can adjust the upload if you want (keep original sizes, make them smaller, add tags, rotate, etc.) or just send them to the site.

Another tool I just noticed today is the "Edit Image" option above each picture. When you click it, it takes you to a Web 2.0-ish space with a number of buttons for different image editing functions. I had a few pictures that were too dark. By clicking contrast and moving the slider, I found the exact sweet spot. It worked better than some of the independent image editing software I've used! Great stuff.

Flickr veterans are all pretty aware of fd's Flickr toys (Big Huge Labs) where you can use your Flickr photos to do some fun stuff. There's a Warholizer, a calendar maker, a badge maker, movie poster maker, and tons more. You could spend a day just messing around with this stuff. (Unrelated to photo stuff - Big Huge Labs also has a totally stripped-down word processor with cool, simple functions that I love. Check it out!)

If you happen to have Yahoo! DSL service, a Flickr "pro" account is free - that means unlimited uploads. If you don't have Yahoo! DSL but you do have a Yahoo e-mail account, you can use that ID and password to create a free Flickr account.

And finally, if you're concerned about security, you don't have to worry. You can designate specific users as family or friends, then set each photo to either be public, family only, or family and friends only. Great stuff.

Let me know if you've discovered another angle on Flickr.