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Flickr Online Photo Service Reviewed
kschoenwandt writes "I have been an early fan of Flickr and while I am by far not as much of a shutter bug as most users seem to be, I enjoy the features and use it regularly. Taking some time out reading, I noticed that I am not the only one impressed: The Globe and Mail published a piece on it as did The Christian Science Monitor. Cool!"
I don't think 2 minor news sites can say that this is the best photo sharing site. I'm not saying that I won't check it out and see if it is worth it to me but unless something a little more well known talks about it I really do not think it is slashdot worthy.
I happen to use ofoto which has worked very well for me although now I'm looking for a more advanced site. One that will allow me to sell my photos to make a profit for me and not just the website.
... I just read on their website.
But, unfortunately, it's just advanced privacy:-(
While also nice, we unfortunately will have to resort to our standard piracy tools...
I don't need a signature.
- http://www.whcc.com/ -- great color-calibrated lightjet output at great prices if you're comfy with ftp
- http://www.pbase.com/ -- a free/cheap host for albums, allows deep links to images
- http://www.printroom.com/ -- a popular site for albums and print order processing
- http://www.smugmug.com/ -- a popular site for albums and print order processing
I used to use ezprints.com for lightjet output, but their color calibration is very spotty and inconsistent these days.[
What I really like about Flickr is the way it brings people together over photographs. They say a picture is worth 1000 words (bring on the picture worth replies) and allowing individuals to comment on photos and discuss topics in the group forums are by far the most often used features for me. The interface is also slick and innovative, tags are of great use in photos (as they are with mail) and the notes feature made possible by thier custom flash rendering scripts are a pretty neat as well.
The Christian Scientists are the people who don't believe in doctors.
Apparently, this site doesn't have any photos of doctors. Hence, their approval.
I use flikr too and the thing I like is the easy integration with various blogs (specifically I use blogger.com, but it works with others). It's easy to create a blog entry from a photo posted to flikr - very convenient.
Some of the features are only available in the Flash interface, and I don't see what the benefit is anyway. Too gee-whizzy.
Can't sleep? View our slide shows!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Hi! I was wondering what the rates are for getting my business mentioned as a front-page Slashdot story? At first I thought that I might have to insert open-source code into my commercial product and claim it as my own, but now that seems to not be necessary.
Thanks in advance for your help.
from their "about us" page
[Mary Baker] Eddy [founder of The Christian Science Monitor]insisted, against strong opposition from some of her advisers and church officers, that the words "Christian Science" should be in the paper's name. According to one of her biographers, Robert Peel, to Eddy, "the designated title was an identification of the paper with the promise that no human situation was beyond healing or rectification if approached with sufficient understanding of man's God-given potentialities. Nor did the "good news" of Christianity involve the prettification of bad news, but rather, its confident confrontation".
There's more information on that page, but in the interest of brevity, I only copy pasted the relevant part of the FAQ.
Um, why don't you look at the web site? The Christian Science Monitor is basically a normal newpaper with only one religious article in each issue. It was founded in 1908 and is published by the First Christ of Christ, Scientist as a public service thing. Check out their FAQ
FTA: Flickr (www.flickr.com) is what's known as a web service or web application -- something between a website and a regular software program. Web services have long been seen as the future, but until recently they've been held back by technical limitations. Now the combination of faster computers, better development tools and greater access to broadband is making them a reality. Some have even taken to calling this new trend the Web 2.0.
/.) think HTTP is the Internet, now we need everyone hyping "Web 2.0", because we all know how much version numbers mean.
Emphasis mine
I can only imagine the marketoid this came from. Its bad enough most people (outside
Sorry, feeling a bit ranty today.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
I'll give you flickr you little whippersnapper!!
In Japan old people talk to online pictures to avoid senility... Seriously... I just signed up for this, and I think it's a lot easier than signing on to my school's VPN to upload a few pics to my student webserver, then disconnecting and going about my business... And it's better than what was that service??? Photobucket I think?
Free Photo iPods.
I use flickr as an easy way of sharing my photos. The dealmaker was the great communities that are on there. People will give you constructive input, not elitist prickery when you post your photos. More than I can say for deviant art/etc.
I hate sigs.
umm.. flamebait? why can't I mod when I really want to? you didn't RTFA did you? there's nothing religious.
Flickr is pretty nice, though personally I'm a bigger fan of fotoflix.com - better multimedia options and a cleaner interface.
I haven't tried that many I'll admit. Thanks for the list above, very useful.
I started using Flickr last month and am very impressed. Granted I don't have a big need to sell my photos, just to manage them easily and quickly.
Two of my favorite features of flickr are the ability to email photos from my phone directly to the site, and the fact that they provide code which enables me to display the last 5 flickr photos on my personal website. In addition to those two features, they allow members to post comments on photos. Plus, you can see how many times each photo has been viewed. Another nice feature is the photographer's ability to make several notes on each photo, which appear when the viewer hovers the mouse pointer over each note's user customizable box.
Yes, there are features I'd like to see incorporated, but the service is still in beta, and considering that I think they've done a great job so far. Check it out. Here's my page:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/travischurch/
Uh, obviously you've never actually read an issue of the CSM otherwise you'd never make such a remark. While it is published by a church (not one I particularly care for btw), it is one of the best researched independant publications in print since they actually have reporters in foreign countries rather then just relying on AP/Newswire/etc. Not quite up to Economist standards in my unhumble opinion, but worth at least looking into.
I've never used Flickr, but I have been using Gallery now for about 2 years. It's Open Source, based on PHP and MySQL. I've had to do two complete machine moves in that time, and it's handled them both flawlessly.
I think of all the OS projects I've used (and I've been at this a while now), Gallery has brought me the most pleasure. I had more or less put down my digital camera, because I found sharing, storing and cataloging photos publicly too much of a pain. Being able to share my photos with my friends and family has just been a real joy for me. (And before someone says it, they're pictures of my garden, not pr0n
Gallery also has a hook to buy photos from Shutterbug (but I haven't been very happy with them so far).
Thanks Gallery!
"...you can steal my woman, but you ain't done nuthin' smart."
Flickr is a really cool site. I do like their keywords and group features. We recently finished a site that's (imo) as good as or better than Flickr. Give some feedback on FotoFlix.
This site lets you create movies with some really nice templates and your own music.
Flickr and FotoFlix are by far the best sites for photo management and sharing.
Better than Flickr - Manage, Share, Archive
That's like saying, oh - ET found, but it was only reported by the WSJ and BBC America, but unless something a little more well known talks about it I really do not think it is slashdot worthy.
I love how worldy and journalistically snobbish slashdot's readership has become, as they truck off to the lofty spires of SharkyExtreme and IGN Vault for reliable news.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Want to get those old photos into the digital world. Check out http://www.digmypics.com/ It's a service that will digitize all of your old photos for a pretty reasonable price.
www.andrewhodel.com, Same thing, been up for years, nothing new people, go on with life.
I'm no fan of the Christian Science Church. It's a little kooky for my tastes. I will say though, that I've been reading the Christian Science Monitor for over 25 years. It's one of the few independent news organizations left, with a surprisingly progressive and balanced view on life and such. Go read a few articles before you knock it too much...
Thanks,
AC
Too bad Flickr uses plain text HTTP authorization.
I wonder if the poster schoenwandt works for Flickr? Things that make you go hmm???
One post mentioned smugmug.com, which is what I settled on after an intense evaluation of 25 sites, including ofoto, Yahoo!, shutterbug, etc. Here is my quick plug for smugmug as a recommendation for anyone else looking to run from ofoto etc. for superior services like flickr or smugmug: 1) Unlimited storage (they get you for downloading - viewing - more than 180,000 med-size jpegs in a month, flickr only limits your UPloading 2) Sharing of ORIGINAL size photos. This is indeed rare. 3) Backups to CD or DVD of ALL your photos (about $25). A great deal for groups like mine with 20,000+ photos. A NEW feature of smugmugs they didn't have a year ago. This was the reason for my intense search. 4) Hotlinking to intelligently organized pictures (www.smugmug.com/-[Ti S M L O].jpg Does it matter if my $0.02 are in Australian dollars?
Test signature: Brett Walker
I think I'll try Flickr. The load on my FC/Apache box is usually quite high the day after I tell friends I have pictures from XYZ event up ...
Oh, and Google's Picasa is quite nice (Windows only, though). Photo organizing, automatic import (warning: any NSFW stuff will be found, heh), etc., but it also has stuff like automatic export to XHTML galleries - I can imagine it'd be quite easy to set it up with a batch file or two so a relative could export them to an XHTML gallery, then run the batch file to transmit it to server space you've given 'em.
I think smugmug's user interface, features, and speed are far superior. You have to pay $29.95 per year, but for that you get no advertisements, unlimited storage, ability to view and download original files, and easy online printing.
Unfortunately, it seems to be very particular about what webhosting services it likes - both of my office's hosts, Readyhosting and Interland don't have enough PHP access to make it work. It works just fine for me at home running XP Pro, Apache and PHP.
It's pretty vanilla but it supports multiple users with permissions, you can add comments, rotate, do batch uploads through either Java applets, a html form or from a URL. I was using statically generated pages from Jalbum and while these lack the prettiness of Jalbum, they are HUGELY more flexible.
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
The Monitor is one of the most highly respected publications in America. It ranks with the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in journalistic circles. Because they know they're being watched by people who think they're nuts, they work extra hard to present even-handed unbiased treatment of the news.
While I personally believe the whole Christian Science thing is a hybrid of nuts and pyramid schemes, I cannot deny that the newspaper is one of the best. I've been reading them off an on for a few years, and they are one of the world's great news resources.
World's tallest building rises in the desert
Am I the only one who thinks the the grampa with grandchildren towards the right looks like he has the biggest hunchback ever?
We Build Beautiful Websites
I used flickr for that Me As Sonny Bono I liked flickr, pretty easy to use.
the only thing religious about the CSM is that it has a single article that is christian oriented. It is published out of boston and I like to think of them in the same way as all those jesuit schools that have free/cheap quality private school education all over asia (including the one that i went to) especially in places others whould not go to.
I'm sure there are people who will mock religion, but nothing is going to diminish the respect i have for the people like those who gave up personal fortunes, moved to third world countries and taught english, science and math (yes including evolution). One father at ST Xavier's in Kathmandu, Nepal was billionare in the US before he gave it all up.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Yes, and we all know the Economists' anonymity is unbiased, right? :: laugh ::
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Does flikr allow you to retain your "rights" to photos? What about the other services out there? I'm not sure I'd want to upload my photos only to see them in ads or otherwise "stolen". Well...maybe those photos of my ex-wife would be OK ;)
Dunno if anyone else remembers, but back when Prozac was new, there was this brief news item that Prozac was causing people to cut themselves. It eventually hit all the major papers, only to disappear once everyone decided it was groundless. The original stories all came from the Christian Science Monitor. In retrospect, those original stories seem to be spurious, and in line with Christian Scientist doctrine.
I realize it's kindof lame to harp on one single tiny item in the paper's excellent history. These articles might not have been poorly researched at all. They might even have been surprisingly prescient, given recent intimations of a link between some SSRIs and suicide in young people. Still, I've never had this little tiny thing explained to my satisfaction, so I bring it up again and again.
Did anybody else pay any attention to this? Was this just poor journalism, unrelated to Christian Scientists? Was their journalism not so bad after all?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
And I'm sure they aren't 98% biased on every issue AT ALL! Just more pablum for the sheep...
I use SimDesk in Houston to share photos with my friends. Flickr only allows photos, but SimDesk allows all sorts files, so I can share my bookmarks and other stuff too.
not bad for free - www.simHouston.com
I have been noticing there have been many advertorials on Slashdot such as this one. I assume this is a new service to generate revenue. Can I get the cost of having a fake story posted on Slashdot?
In Korea, online photo services are only for old people.
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Is anyone else amazed at the number of people here on Slashdot that apparently have never heard of CSM prior to this article?
Learn more about the periodical before your dismiss it based on its title.
What?
I find $30+ for a yearly subscription too much... you can get decent web hosting for gallery, your home page, web log, email, etc. for well under $100. While flickr and the other services mentioned are slick, they don't justify the expense IMHO.
I've been using http://www.fotki.com/ for the past several years. For $30/year you get unlimited storage (I have over 7000 photos, using 15 gb). In addition, you get easy, deep linking to original resolution photos. And most important (for me), there is ftp access for upload/download. I have a 1 line "wget" statement running in cron that each night automatically syncronizes every photo of mine @ fotki and stores a copy on my local machine. That way, if my hard disk crashes, I get back every photo from them. If they go out of business, I have a copy of everything. They also have photo printing, but I prefer the quality of other sites better (I've tried 10+!!)
I work at Flickr. Of paricular note to /.rs, check out our open API: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/
I've been working on a site that, among other things, hosts outdoor related photos. It will be back under active development in a few weeks when the semester is over.
http://www.unearthedoutdoors.com/
~SethYou mentioned trying 10+ printing services. Care to share what you learned? Who's got the best price/quality ratio? Service? Flexibility?
Push the envelope. Watch it bend. -Tool
Don't suppose you'd be willing to share your wget statement? (I've only used wget very minimally.....)
Has anyone out there used http://www.mpix.com/ to get prints of their photos? How was the service? Quality of prints? etc.
Push the envelope. Watch it bend. -Tool
Here is a new one I found. http://www.digipicstorage.com It's almost done being developed, but looks promising. The thing I like about it is that you can use any FTP program, or the web based tool to send/receive the pics. They also guarantee your pics won't be lost or deleted. None of the other sites I've found offer that. You can also send e-cards with your pics which should be cool.
Sheesh, I bet you aren't even an Economist.
[
wget -T 120 -m -c -P /tmp/photos ftp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@ftp.fotki.com/
The search isn't acessible from the front page. When I pointed this error out, tech support gave me a rude response. YMMV.
1/3 of jokes get modded OT. If you get the joke, mod 1 in 3 insightful/interesting/underrated to restore karma balance.
AND searches (multiple tag searches). For instance, if I am looking for pictures of cats and dogs together, I would like to be able to find all photos tagged both "cat" and "dog". Right now, it appears Flickr only supports single keyword browsing.
OR searches. "dog AND (cat OR kitten)"
Date range searches, based on when the file was uploaded, and/or ability to sort on date.
Ability to limit searches to various photo size ranges.
No need for flash. Flash makes this site slow, at least in comparison to pure html based galleries I have seen.
For the curious, we actually ran an intensive, scientific, blind "taste test" of all the major labs/printing services.
Details to be found here.
Enjoy!
Don
my smug mug is on smugmug
Since this is /. and all:
"The Christian Science building in Boston [the one related to the Christian Science Monitor] is a favorite photographic subject as an architecturally interesting building. Additionally, in the early days of MIT's radar history, the Christian Science building was one of the more prominent buildings (before it was occluded by the newer tall skyscrapers) and showed up clearly on radar. It was a favorite test subject, and instantly recognizable on screen. When the first major breakthrough in radar (transmitting and receiving through the same antenna) occurred, during World War II, this great news was broadcast to the world through a cryptic shortwave message saying "Saw Mary Baker Eddy with one eye." By this, it was meant that a clear picture of the Christian Science building could be seen with just one antenna (rather than two antennas as had previously been the case, they being separate transmit and receive antennas). Of course the enemy had no way of knowing what this cryptic message meant, but the allies knew an important moment in history had occurred.
Thus the Christian Science building, in addition to being an important architectural landmark, is also an important radar landmark."
Got that from the great wikipedia article on them.
Cool stuff!
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
If they make the photos "cross postable" to other sites they probably use flash to prevent people from taking your images and cross posting them.
I have a photo site and my images have ended up as backgrounds on a number of Blogs (I would never have noticed except they didn't copy the image they cross posted it.).
Its probably to stop that, but if it makes it so noone wants to see the originals it isn't worth it.
mpix is a very nice printing service. They're the consumer division for miller's (one of the best known and used pro-only printing labs).
Easy to upload files to them, and they're one of the few services that accept any size of TIFF files.
The digital black and white paper is very nice. So is the metallic.
-
Serious nerds want the ability to host their own sites and customize everything. This flickr site seems cool, but because the tinfoil blocks the waves of complacency, I know better than to trust others with my photographs unless I have TC (total control). I am considering the options. I really want advice instead of a flame war. What are the relative merits of Gallery and Coppermine?
I have read a little. It seems that the 1.4 branch of Gallery has many kludges, and the next big update might be a while yet. Coppermine looks good, but maybe it's development and use are somewhat less. What are the big issues? Are there other good alternatives besides these two?
Thanks!
That if this service is ever introduced in the Netherlands they pick another name for it.
... poofy.
Phoneticly it sounds a bit
-- forget
The flash usage is just one of many things about flickr that I can't take. It could potentially be great, if they removed about 80% of the features and fluff.
I'm currently using http://www.fotothing.com/. It's nice and simple, like fotolog, but without fotolog's 500,000 Brazilian camgirls and ridiculously bad performance.
I've gotten to be quite a fan of buzznet for image sharing. nice interface, growing featureset, free, of course.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
I want an API that lets me upload images for printing on demand. I have 7500 images in my photo database and I'm perfectly happy hosting them on my own server; but I also want people to be able to order prints. Uploading all 7500 to ofoto or shutterfly would be a bad idea. What should happen is a viewer clicks on an "Order Print" button on my site, and behind the scenes a CGI on my system uploads that file to the service and then redirects the viewer to a page where he or she can place an order. The service handles billing, printing, and shipping, and also sends me a percentage.
"brxref
why would you make an image hosting site use FLASH for static content?!
I have to give my praise for White House Custom Color (WHCC). They are still small enough that they will sometimes call you to make sure you're happy with their work, send you five free 8x10s of your images and samples of all of their paper when you open an account with them, and I've never seen photos packaged so carefully when they are mailed to me.
I don't work for WHCC, etc., just a satisfied customer, but it's also a great example of a brick and mortar service company that has expanded to embrace the Internet.
BTW, this is based on my experiences where I did all of my own color correction with calibrated monitors in a controlled lighting environment. I can't speak for their color correction services.
I opted for flickr because they were cheap, had lots of metadata and open API's. I really missed a linux photo uploader client, which smugmug seems to have, a really big deal.
The best thing going for smugmug is that the open API's might inspire a linux dude to write his own uploader/metadata capture tool.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
On ourdoings.com there is no use of flash, JavaScript is optional, and the client-side uploading software is supported on Linux. If you have a large pile of photos to put up, ourdoings.com handily beats all the "best" services out there, organizing them by the digital timestamps so that you can quickly put in entries for the appropriate dates.
Nobody wants to sit through a slide show, so service providers save a lot of bandwidth by the user going elsewhere. I find it much more user-friendly to put a bunch of 640x480 shots on one page and let people scroll up and down to look at the ones they're interested in. At only 50kb or so per image, it isn't a ton of bandwidth either.
Both ofoto and shutterfly have a business model where the money is made off of prints. If they provided really good sharing, customers would probably only order prints of the very best pictures. They'd be happy to just look at most of them on the web.
Implicitly, you grant them license to display your photos the way you intend them to be displayed on their service. Read any "service agreement" before you agree to it to see if you're also granting them license to use photos in advertising, etc. I don't know about the other services out there, except my own ourdoings.com does not get rights to "steal" your work in any way.
I don't want any part of their religious cult kookery! I'll stick with my Washington Times and FOX news for Fair and Balanced coverage, thank you very much.
Seriously, though, you gotta respect that they at least let you in on the potential bias. I wish Rev. Moon and Rupert Murdoch would have let us know up front what brand of crazy they were selling.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
i've been digging shutterbook lately, if only that it behaves much more like a desktop application. which is neat. hooray.
Do any of the online photo services (ofoto, snapfish, etc.) provide an SDK that would let developers bundle professional photo printing capabilities into custom software or web sites? I would like to host photos on my website using some custom software I wrote (or any of the hundreds of PHP-based alternatives), but I want family and friends to be able to order printed copies of the photos.
I realize that I can upload the photos to one of these services, but I would prefer to upload the photo to the service on-demand.
Adobe Photoshop Album provides this service in their software package using a wizard, but they probably deal with different business development people than Joe Schmo sharing photos with his friends.
I've been a big fan of Adobe Photoshop Album since it came out a couple of years ago. Like FlickR it uses tags to organize photos, and multiple tags can be assigned to the same picture. Lookups are incredible fast, and there are customizable templates for web posting. Since I 'blog' I like to keep stuff on my site so I can earn some Google ad revenues.
Most impressive is the amount of logging data it keeps. The program keeps track of when each photo was imported (by session as well as date) into the system so you can make adjustments at a later time to a certain import run.
It integrates fairly seamlessly with photoshop and always backs up the original photograph before you start mangling it :).
Sadly it's Windows only. Not sure if it works on WINE, but I'd highly recommend it to somebody who stores a boatload of photos like me.
www.lonseidman.com
The comments are encouraging for an amateur photographer like me who wants to take good pictures for people to enjoy, and not be eviscerated by a professional critic.
Definitely room for improvement (sets of sets, printing integration), but they seem to be hard at work making this happen. And it looks like they're going to charge $60/year, which seems kind of pricey compared to the competition.
What finally (after a couple days) pushed me over the edge to pay them and subscribe were the fact that they have seamless integration with Creative Commons licenses for your photos (cool-factor points), and an open open API for managing your photos through 3rd-party scripts. With it, I've written a python script that I use to batch-upload and annotate photos. I haven't tried their client with Wine, so I don't know if that option exists for Linux-only users.
you are aware that there has been recent research into the link between anti-depressants & a rise in suicide (I think it was in children). So maybe they weren't so wrong as you think ...
I run gallery as well and it actually integrates perfectly into geeklog. (Shamesless plug http://www.becauseimbored.com/ No its not Pr0n :) I am also currenlty working on another site based off of Gallery2 which has some great improvments. The CVS source is fairly stable, and the features which have been added to gallery2 are great.
:)
Linking to webcam images - These images will auto-update at an interval that you decide.
New panaroma module that allows viewing panaromic pictures taken with a digital camera. I havent tested this module yet, nor will I ever get a chance, but a very cool feature none the less.
Shopping Cart I havent used this yet, but for an amature photographer to sell his/hers works this could be a really nice feature.
Displaying of movies - Im not sure on the compatibilty with this particular feature but it uses ffmpeg to display the movies. I tested this on a episode of futurama standard MPEG2 encoding and it seemed to work fine
New user registration/creation of new user albums - When a new user registers it will automagically create a album based on that user.
User Comments - users can make comments and vote on pics.
Nokia Upload API - Apparenlty certain certain nokia phones can interface with this API and upload pictures taken from the camera phone. I currently do this using a bash script a perl script called galleryadd and postfix. Postfix receives the email forwards it to procmail whcih calls the bash script which then invokes galleryadd. (another shamless plug http://www.wapcams.net/Email pics@wapcams.net if you want to add something
Like Gallery1 it used a MySql backend and php scripting. Themes are also being addressed in G2 to make it easier for the admin to customize the look and feel of his/her site.
There is also talk of implemting a "Click to buy" function which will allow you sell your pics through gallery. Overall its looks very promising. And new features are being added all the time. Check it out http://gallery.sourceforge.net/
www.imagestation.com
From my post:
"They might even have been surprisingly prescient, given recent intimations of a link between some SSRIs and suicide in young people."
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=3&u= /ap/20041204/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/seals_prisoner_phot os/
A reporter finds some private photos on smugmug with google, BUYS them for 29 cents, and the owner is wondering why they were available to the public at all. Now they are no longer available and the google search leads to smugmug. I wonder if the woman has grounds for a lawsuit? Maybe the part below from their terms of use gives them an out? Are googling reporters considered "third party hackers"? Ouch.
"smugmug uses industry standard security measures to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. Although we make good faith efforts to store the non-public information collected by the smugmug website in a secure operating environment that is not available to the public, we cannot guarantee complete security. Further, while we make every effort to ensure the integrity and security of our network and systems, we cannot guarantee that our security measures will prevent third-party "hackers" from illegally accessing our site."
http://www.flickr.com/photos/caterina/35187/
.. image owners can open permissions that allow friends, family or anyone with a flickr account to add notes that highlight areas of the image with little comments.
you'll notice the use of notes on certain images
http://www.flickr.com/photos/caterina/35187/
if you hover your mouse over the image, you can see descriptions of the various goings on in the photo.
it may be a little 'gee-whizzy', but it can be a good way of overlaying information onto the photo.