Item Purchased: Flickr.com Pro Account
Location Purchased:
Price: $24.95
Review: If only all online storage and bandwidth were this much of a value! Not that you can do anything you want to with Flickr… you can’t.
is one of the most popular online image hosting services, but to leave it at that would be like saying that Paris Hilton is annoying. Both statements are true, but neither illuminates the larger truth. In addition to letting you store thousands of images of your children engaged in ordinary banal activities, Flickr also serves as a social networking tool, a worldwide message board, and a way for photographers to license and organize their work by offering an array of licenses (including Creative Commons) and organizing tools.
My primary reason for using Flickr is to host images I display on Consumatron and BurningJelly.com. Flickr does offer a free account to users that allows you to upload 20MB of images a month. Other restrictions include a limit of 3 online photo albums and the ability to only view the last 200 images on your account. A paid account offers a 2GB upload limit, unlimited photo albums, unlimited viewing and other advantages. The free account is usually enough for most people who aren’t avid photographers, but I found myself nearing my limit this month, so I purchased a pro account.
As I continue to take pictures of my purchases, the prepaid storage space on Flickr will pay for itself in the long run. Instead of hosting images on my webserver, which charges fees for going over my allotted bandwidth limits, all I will have to worry about now is text. Though I write a lot each day, it would probably take me years to fill up my storage space or bandwidth with text.
In addition to relying on Flickr for storage, there are other advantages to their services. First, I am able to “tag” my images with short descriptions in order to allow anyone who is looking for a picture of, say, garbanzo beans to type in the word “garbanzo” and find my picture. Second, users of Flickr are able to send messages to one another, comment on pictures, subscribe to each other’s image feed and network through their images. And let’s face it, in this day and age, most social networking is done based on shallow qualities such as image.
As yet another way to harbor community and promote digital word-of-mouth, Flickr is one of the highlights of this mediascape that is being labeled Web 2.0. In addition to blogging, , podcasting and video sharing, expect sites like Flickr to continue to develop, increasing community (be it based on creativity or profit) for a long time. I’ve always believed that the internet is a great tool to make connections with and it is user friendly sites like Flickr that engage people into doing so.
Rating: 4 / 5
Check out my Flickr photostream:
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