A great way to share photos: Flickr

Flickr was at the forefront of social media photo sharing, but has since been overtaken by Facebook, and more recently Instagram. This article on Gizmodo has a good broad overview of some of the problems that Flickr has had since being purchased by Yahoo, but happily it seems to be improving and I still think it is still a really good tool for social photo sharing, and organisation of images if you take a lot of photos.

I have been using Flickr for some years, and used to pay for a pro account to get the higher storage. Happily, last year they changed to a free terabyte of storage, which is really amazing if you take a lot of photos. I use Flickr as a backup of my photo library, and to share with friends. I like that I can download the images I put up at full size if I need to, I can retain ownership of them, and control who sees them. Here is a photo I took a while back, of a double rainbow over Brunswick.

I also like that I can adjust the privacy settings on individual images, so I am able to set this one to public to share. If you become my friend on Flickr, you can see my other photos.
I chose "Attribution-Non-commercial-ShareAlike" because I want my image attributed- despite just being an iphone snap I am proud of being able to capture it. I do not want someone else to make money off my photo, so I chose non-commercial, and ShareAlike means that those that share it should respect my wishes and use it in the same way.
Because I mostly have my settings on private, I don't worry so much about setting the usage rights, however if I was more openly sharing images with people who were not friends and family, then I would consider this to be a good setting.

To upload in bulk, I have linked up my iphoto program on my computer with Flickr, enabling me to put a whole album up in one go. You can also share from Flickr to other social media such as Twitter and Facebook, providing an easy way to manage all of your image sharing from one place.

Flickr does not seem to be particularly popular unless you take a lot of pictures, my friends that use it are mostly photographers, designers, or amateur photography and travel enthusiasts like myself. This limits my level of social interaction compared to other social media platforms, and I mostly just use it for storage and organisation. I have also used it to make Christmas presents for my family by linking with a printed photo book provider, which was surprisingly easy and fun to do!

In the context of information management, Flickr is a great tool as it provides free storage, and the ability to set your images up with different levels of copyright, allowing free sharing. You can also use Flickr to source images, by using tags. The more information added to each image, and the more images available, the more useful it becomes. The Creative Commons usage rights make it easier to attribute work appropriately to the author, which is important in an ethical professional such as information management.