Paris_2009_07-356, originally uploaded by Mathew Mitchell.During the past month I explored a variety of options for sharing photos. I looked at SmugMug (great for real professionals), Picasa, MobileMe, and a bunch of other solutions. But for my purposes, the best choice was Flickr Pro.
Flickr comes in a free version that limits you to storing 200 photos total. That's a perfectly fine solution for some people, but I chose to pay the $25 per year upgrade to the pro version so I'd have the ability to upload as much material as I wanted, at whatever size I wanted. In and of itself, this doesn't make Flickr Pro special—SmugMug and others do the same thing. So what made Flickr the right choice for me?
It all has to do with the internet. If I want to do something special with my images, then I'll print them out or I'll create a multimedia presentation out of them. I don't need a web-photo service for showing stuff. But what I would like to do is have a very easy way to share images with other people, have multiple pathways for getting images to my web-sharing service, and have a pretty-cool way to display lots of images. In all these ways Flickr Pro shines.
Easy Sharing
All photo sharing services make it easy for someone to come to their website and see your photos. But that's not what I wanted. Instead I wanted a place to store photos and then reuse them easily. Sure, some friends and family may go to my Flickr location and check things out. What I mainly needed, however, was an easy way for me to incorporate images into blog posts. The blog you're reading right now is on the website where I'm least active—that's because I have several course and professional websites that I need to maintain.Flickr offers a very simple option. For each photo you view at Flickr there's an option above the photo that says: Blog This. You can set up Flickr to send messages to a variety of blogs that you've set up. I use Blogger, and then have my Blogger blogs connect to my RapidWeaver websites. Flickr allows me to send blog posts directly to Blogger. But Flickr also offers lots of other options in addition to Blogger. Just as important, Flickr offers templates for how "image blogs" look for each website blog you connect with. In the case of this post, the image at the top has been set to be 500 pixels wide. You have about 5 other template choices and you can customize as much as you want at Flickr. But the bottom line is once I have a "image blog" template set up then all I have to do is select an image, click on "blog this," write my title and text, press submit and it's all sent to my designated blog in exactly the format I want! Very easy, very elegant.
The image-goodness doesn't end there. If you go up to the image at the top of this post (girl with ice cream cone) and click on the image then you'll be taken to that image within Flickr. And once you're there it's easy to press the "all sizes" button. This allows you to see the image in a variety of sizes, especially a variety of larger sizes. This can be very important in some cases. So Flickr offers me a simple way to create "image blog posts" that also allow the user to choose to see the bigger sized image if they so desire. Nice.
Multiple Pathways
For a website like this one I mainly post photographic images, but for my educational learning websites I'm more likely to post a scan showing how to solve a statistics problem, a screenshot showing how to do a particular step in some software, or post a graphic organizer I created in something like OmniGraffle. Flickr handles all these kinds of images as well. More importantly it's easy for me to upload this great variety of images easily to Flickr. For example, iPhoto has a direct upload option of images to Flickr. LittleSnapper (which I use for screenshots on my computer) has a direct upload to Flickr. There's free Frickr Uploader software, and more. Put differently, more and more software products that deal with images are allowing you to directly upload to Flickr from that software. This increasing level of simplicity for using Flickr with software I already use anyway makes it a much better choice for me relative to other options.Cool Display Options
Flickr seems to play well with others—and this is a consequence of Flickr making it easy for software developers to create products that connect to Flickr images. There's lots of examples around, but my current favorite is Cooliris. You can install Cooliris manually on a website, or if you use RapidWeaver then you can buy a very inexpensive plugin from Joe Workman ($7.95) that allows Cooliris to show up on your pages.For me Cooliris offers a great way to display a large collection of photos relative to the typical photo gallery approach. Cooliris has a very nice 3D effect. When you select a photo within it's "stream" of photos it then enlarges to the size of the Cooliris screen (not all that large). From there you can click on a connect button that takes you directly to that photo in Flickr—where you can enlarge, download, print, share the photo with others. I'm still playing around with my Cooliris settings, but you can see an example of how this works in the Photo section of this website. Cooliris works with other services (such as SmugMug), but from my testing I found that it works easiest and best with Flickr.
