Back in the fall of 2004, Mark and I attended a New Media BC event on Blogs at VFS, the two speakers; Darren Barefoot and Roland Tanglao covered various aspects of blogging and other technologies. It was on that night that I was introduced to flickr.
What is Flickr?
Flickr is most certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.
Flickr is a way to get your photos to the people who matter to you. With Flickr you can:
- Show off your favorite photos to the world
- Blog the photos you take with a cameraphone
- Securely and privately show photos to your friends and family across the country
- ... and much, much more!
And basic accounts are free!
- 250MB monthly upload limit
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited photosets
Some of the other Flickr features include:
- Full RSS and Atom support
- Easy uploading tools to make it easy to upload big batches of photos from Windows and Macintosh, complete with tags and privacy settings!
- A mobile version of the website so you can see the latest photos on your web-enabled cell phone or PDA
- Moblogging directly to any blog, by email
- Group photo pools, so everyone at a wedding, for example, can put their photos in one place.
I didn't take on to their service right away; it took me a while to warm up to the idea of sharing my pictures. Over the past 6 months, I have grown more open to Creative Commons License and started sharing my images with the public. I guess it was the natural progress since both Mark and I have taken the open source route at Raincity studios and share our work with our peers and on Drupal.org.
About two months ago, I started to upload parts of my library, composed of over 8000 images. Soon, I realized that the basic account would not do for me. I was sold on their service. For $41.77 I would get 1GB of bandwidth per month, allowing me to upload my images without worrying about running out of bandwidth.
Last week I received a great email from flick:
Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we're in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today.
I would like to extend to the team a big Thank you! May your hard work continue to bring you success.
As for us lucky believers, we now have double the upload bandwidth (2GB a month), our annual membership has been extended and we also received two pro accounts to give away. Which one was to go to our friend Sandra, but she just got herself an account before I could tell her the news.
Check out my pictures, add me to your contacts, I feature mine on my Zeitgeist.