What Is Flickr?

Ever wonder, "What is Flickr?" Flickr is one of the most popular online photo management and sharing sites. It is relatively easy to use, and a basic account is free. Users can upgrade their free basic account to a paid "pro" account, to gain access to even more features. Flickr tools make it fun for you to share your photos online. Here are some of the cool features that make Flickr the photo-sharing site of choice for so many people.

Easy Uploads

Flickr features several easy ways to upload your pictures onto the site. You can either upload from your desktop, send from your phone or e-mail your photos. The Flickr uploader tool is particularly user-friendly. There are also many ways to organize your photos on Flickr. You can tag your photos, as well as group them into sets. You can further organize by making collections of various sets.

What is Flickr and Can it Fix Red-Eye?

Another advantage of Flickr is that it allows you to edit your photos within the site via their partner, Picnik. You can make your photos look better by cropping, eliminating red eye or even adding special effects, words and graphics. Flickr doesn't just display your photos online; you can also order cool things made from your photos, such as prints, photo cards, calendars, photo books, etc.

Keep Things Private

The privacy controls on Flickr give you lots of options. Professional and hobbyist photographers who learn what is Flickr will be able to make all of their photos public. Users can also set restrictions so only family and friends can see their photos. Flickr allows you to have different levels of contacts, friends and family to give you greater control over who sees your photos.

You can also join various groups to share photos. Many groups are public, but some are by invitation only and some are private.

Find Photos

Flickr allows users to stay informed when their contacts have uploaded new photos. You can receive e-mail notifications of friends' and family's recent uploads. You can also get notifications on new comments and other activity on your own photostream.

To get yourself started on Flickr, try a free basic account first. If you like it, you can always upgrade to the pro account later.

Flickr offers two types of accounts: Free and Pro. Free account users are allowed to upload 300 MB of images a month and 2 videos. Also, if a free user has more than 200 photos on the site, they will only be able to see the most recent 200 in their photostream. The other photos that were uploaded are still stored on the site and links to these images in blog posts remain active. Free users can also contribute to a maximum of 10 photo pools. If a free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, Flickr reserves the right to delete it. For a free account, no one (including the account owner) can access the original file. If the account is upgraded to a pro account, then the original files are available for download.

Pro accounts allow users to upload an unlimited number of images and videos every month and receive unlimited bandwidth and storage. Photos may be placed in up to 60 group pools, and Pro account users receive ad-free browsing and have access to account statistics. As soon as a Pro account expires, it reverts back to the restrictions of a free account, including Flickr reserving the right to delete an account that is "inactive for 90 consecutive days".  Unfortunately Flickr may delete a Pro account without giving any reason nor warning to the account's owner.  I have set myself up on flickr recently you can check out some of my photos if you do a earch for my profile donegalblaze.

Filtering

In March 2007, Flickr added new content filtering controls that let members specify by default what types of images they generally upload (photo, art/illustration, or screenshot) and how "safe" (i.e., unlikely to offend others) their images are, as well as specify that information for specific images individually. In addition, users can specify the same criteria when searching for images. There are some restrictions on searches for certain types of users: non-members must always use SafeSearch, which omits images noted as potentially offensive, while members whose Yahoo! accounts indicate that they are underage may use SafeSearch or moderate SafeSearch, but cannot turn SafeSearch off completely.

Flickr has since used this setting to change the level of accessibility to "unsafe" content for entire nations, including South Korea, Hong Kong, and Germany. In summer 2007, German users staged a "revolt" over being assigned to the user rights of a minor.