Beginner’s guide to Flickr
Why use Flickr?
Instead of emailing around photos as attachments, you can upload them once to Flickr and then link directly to the photo. They are then available in a variety of different sizes in one place and can be used for lots of different purposes.
When you have lots of pictures to deal with, there are tools to help you upload and organise lots of photos at once.
Flickr does some useful things like automatically making small versions (thumbnails), medium-sized and larger versions of your photos. You can also do other things like make a slideshow or display your latest pictures on your blog or website, or even upload photos direct from your phone without having to put them on your computer first.
Privacy
You can choose to share all your photos with everyone or restrict access to some or all of your photos to other Flickr users who are either ‘friends’ or ‘family’. This means that you can send them a link that only certain people can see because they will have to log in to Flickr and be one of your contacts.
Copyright
In most parts of the world, including the UK, you are automatically granted copyrights to your photos. You can set a preference that controls who can download all the different sized versions of your photos. However, you can choose to ‘license’ your photos in a different way and allow other people to use your photos in return for a credit or just complete freedom to reproduce. There are six ‘Creative Commons’ licences that you can choose to apply to your photos.
How much does it cost?
There is a free version of Flickr but it does have some limitations
| Free | Pro ($24.95 per year – Paypal) |
| 100 MB monthly photo upload limit (10MB per photo) | Unlimited photo uploads (20MB per photo) |
| 2 video uploads each month (90 seconds max, 150MB per video) | Unlimited video uploads (90 seconds max, 500MB per video) |
| The ability to show HD Video | |
| Photostream views limited to the 200 most recent images | Unlimited storage (space for storing photos) |
| Unlimited bandwidth (amount of people downloading your photos) | |
| Only smaller (resized) images accessible (though the originals are saved in case you upgrade later) | Archiving of high-resolution original images |
| The ability to replace a photo | |
| Post any of your photos in up to 10 group pools | Post any of your photos or videos in up to 60 group pools |
| Ad-free browsing and sharing | |
| View count and referrer statistics | |
http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/
The free version is good to experiment with as it has exactly the same interface (look and feel) as the Pro version, but if you intend to share more than 100 pictures in a year, then it can save a lot of time and effort compared with using email by upgrading.
