Why I like FLICKR?

To be honest first I didnt recognise the potencial of FLICKR (www.flickr.com). I was a little bit disappointed of the different photo sharing sites I tried before and I switched to FLICKR with a bad mood looking for a simple storage of photos only.

Well, as a storage it served me very well. For the first 6 months my only activity was on FLICKR to upload my photos there. Why?

- because its easier to show the photos for friends, for family if you just send a link instead of attaching each of them one by one. If you wanna prevent others to see your photos you can set it as private choosing certain people only to see them.

- Since I am actively blogging my photos away very soon I have recognised that FLICKR is perfect tool for blogging. The system automaticaly creates html code for your photos in different sizes. Much easier to insert a photo to any hosting site with html code than to upload them to your hosting service's site. For example wordpress (which I use for my www.budapestdailyphoto.com) limits the number of photos you can upload. After a while it might be difficult to post. But if you insert html code it doesnt take any space.

- beside creating html codes for your photos you can blog them directly if you register your blogs on flickr. Just pushing two-three buttons, setting up the desired size and location you can blog your photos directly from you account.

But this is only a little part of the opportunities you can have on FLICKR.

After 6 months of inactivities I realized that Flickr is a perfect tool for giving publicity for your photos (lately for videos, too but I am not really into videos there).

How to give publicity for your photo?

- Add people to you contact list (as friends or as contacts) and they will see your latest uploaded photos on their main page. Since recently I have about 2000 people on my FLICKR contact list as soon as I upload a photo usually I immediately have an audience for them and some of them actively comment on my photos.

- Join to groups, award photos and be awarded. On FLICKR you can find a lot of groups in diffferent topics. Some groups have more then 20.000 members that are ready to see new photos and to award the best of them. You can add a photo to as many as 60 groups at the same time. It may bring pretty large audience to your photo.

I have joined to several groups and recently I have 7800 photos uploaded that got viewed altogether about 550.000 times in the last 1,5 years. It means an average of 70 views on all pictures I uploaded.

My most viewed photo is this with 8251 views.



Of course, sex sells everything. After the cheerleaders photos this one is the most viewed with 4835 views.



I think its pretty large publicity, especially considering that I do not really have time to add my photos to groups regularly.

But thats not all, yet.

What I wrote until know is still the very passive way of FLICKR-ing. Actually FLICKR is very interactive and very user-led (with some limitations).

How is FLICKR interactive?

- commenting on photos, sending flickrmails, awarding photos and taking part in discussiong threads and comeptitions are widely used activities there. FLICKR can be very addictive for some months I was totally obsessed with it.

- to me the most interesting is that you can not only joing to groups but you can create and manage your own group, too. Actually the 1000s of groups you can find there are mostly run by the users and not official groups of the FLICKR staff. It seems FLICKR brings you the frame but that enourmous rich content is provided by the users. Without them FLICKR would be just an empty box, all the life is brought there by us.

- I also have some groups. To create one is realy easy and after you invited some people you can see your baby growing because everyone has an other someone to invite or people find your group seeing the active life there.

My most successful group on FLICKR is the Breathtaking Group that has recently 17.000 member and almost 200.000 photos added. This huge number is not only my achievement the biggest fun there is to build a real living community. To manage your group you can invite moderators and admins being your mates and maintaining a good team work from very different points of the world. Recently I am working together with a Mexican and with a British guy and with a Russian and American lady as a team and I can admit that I enjoy working with them a lot. Its not a job, its fun for us and maybe exactly thats what makes it so pleasureful and successful.

What I dont like in FLICKR?

- I do not like that its not for free. It is, but only for the first 200 photos you upload. If you are active on the site it wont be enough thats for sure.
- I also dont like that the system is quite slow very often. I dont know what they are using in the background, but if you open a photo or group of photos that have several awards and comments it takes a lot of time to be downloaded. I guess nowdays this speed is not forgivable FLICKR has to improve it soon.
- Though FLICKR is very user led, the few occassions when the staff do something can be really annoying. Couple of months ago they have changed the entire look of the site rearranging the dashboards, too. Lot of people complained but all these feedbacks got ignored. I didnt like this.

Some says that people will be in trouble if one day FLICKR will be disappearing just like many other sites did. Especially those who uploaded their photos and this is the only copy they have. Again others say what if one day FLICKR will be bought by an aggressive big shark and all the rights of your own photos suddenly will be questioned because they will find a way saying since you uploaded them they are not yours only anymore.

I am not afraid. I have an own copy of my photos on CDs and I am not really into the copyrights of the photos. I believe in sharing and even I believe that even if I will want to make money from my photos will be more successful by sharing and spreading them freely generating as large publicity as possible then just simply opening a site and trying to sell the photos directly. In the age of internet only losers buy/purchase photos directly. A fair agreement of crediting is more then enough to me as a mutual benefit.

Flickr provides you all the opportunities for this. I love that site and the living communities there.

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