Flashy New Flickr

I do a lot more posting about photography on another blog, but I think this news has enough crossover to make it worthwhile here. Plus, this is generally where I post reviews. Plus plus I haven't posted here in a while. Plus plus plus you really should be on Flickr.

I hadn't heard anything about Flickr making an updates to their site, so I was surprised when I logged in earlier today and was greeted with a blacktastic welcome screen. Did I type the URL wrong? No... those are my photos...

So let's backtrack. Flickr is probably best described as a social photography site. Lumping it in as social networking seem so limiting though. Let's backtrack again. I'll list some of the features/uses for Flickr (in the order I utilize them) and hopefully explain how Flickr is more than a photo Facebook.

1. Host and archive your images. In photography (especially digital photography) there's a saying: "If it doesn't exist in three places, it doesn't exist." If your photo is on your memory card it could be lost, damaged, corrupted or stolen. If it's on your computer hard drive the same risks apply. But there's also a saying that goes, "Once something is online it can never truly disappear." Flickr is an (admittedly poor) option to help with that. Throw your photos on Flickr and they're in the cloud. You can access them anywhere with an internet connection. With a free Flickr account you can host up to 200 photos, and with a paid account (something like $20 per year) you can have unlimited storage. That being said, I cannot imagine the amount of mourning and gnashing of teeth I would display if I was forced to recover the 4,000ish photos (a fraction of my total image library) one at a time via Flickr. But it's better than nothing.
2. Sharing images in other places. Like this:
   
   That from someone who doesn't know a thing about HTML. Luckily Flickr automatically produces code for various sizes of your photos that you can copy and paste anywhere. It also has integrated tools to share your images directly to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Blogger (hey, that's this!). 
3. Get Social. Ok, so now we're starting to get to social aspects of Flickr. You can find and friend other Flickr users. Then their new shots will always appear on your home page. You can also join Flickr groups based on camera, area of interest, geographic region and virtually any other factor you can think of. These groups have pools for sharing photos and discussion boards for learning all kinds of information. Some feature challenges/themes/contests to keep you inspired. 
4. Get Geeky. So Flickr captures and utilizes all the EXIF data from your shots. What's EXIF data? Your camera saves all kinds of information in your image files. The type of camera you use, the lens, all the settings... you can even set your name and copyright info to go in automatically. This helps you learn more about the shots you like, from your own photo stream and from others. You can use this information to deconstruct their shots and figure out how to apply the principles yourself. 
5. EXPLORE. You'll want to make sure you have hours of free time before clicking on Flickr's Explore link. The mystical wizards at Flickr have come up with a magic algorithm that ranks the interestingness of photos based on number of views, favorites and comments. Each day the 100(?) most popular images get populated into the Explore page pool. You can get lost for hours pouring over the beauty and brilliance that's displayed here. But wait, there's more! You can search for photos on a map of the world (some cameras also save the location where photos were taken, or you can manually place them on a map). Talk about vacation planning potential! You can also do camera research by exploring by camera and looking at images others have taken.

So back to the update. I've been on Flickr since 2007. During that time the site has stayed pretty much the same. Boringly functional (my words). I personally kinda like that. I still have a LiveJounrnal and have opted out of the updates that have been applied since I started my account in 2001. I'm reluctant to change. But I'm super excited about Flickr's changes. The smooth black interface and automatic tiling of photos feels really good. And it seems like almost every photo looks better against a black background anyways. The look is a little more Facebooky, but it's tolerable. It looks like there's still some kinks to work out, but I'm pretty confident in giving my thumbs up to the new Flickr.