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A History of Flickr
Ant writes "USA Today has an interesting look back at how Flickr was born. From the article 'Caterina Fake knew she was on to something when one of the engineers at her Vancouver, British Columbia-based online game start-up created a cool tool to share photos and save them to a Web page while playing. "It turned out the fun was in the photo sharing," she says. Fake scrapped the game. She and her programmer husband, Stewart Butterfield, transformed the project into Flickr. In less than two years, the photo-sharing site -- now owned by Internet giant Yahoo! -- has turned into one of the Web's fastest-growing properties.'"
I've never used Flickr, but I have been using Gallery now for about 6 months. 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 image organization programs and services I've used (and there's a whole lotta them!), 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 no, it's not pr0n.
I suppose I could use the Flickr API, but I just wanted something I could stick on my own private site. If something bad happened with Flickr it would be far too much of a hassle to have to deal with someone else's system.
Yet the audience isn't trapped in a dark room. People only view Flickr if they want to.
You can put up a photo and sent the URL to your friends. Unlike many other photo sharing sites the viewer doesn't have to join. By default every photo is viewable by anyone, though you can restrict this if you wish.
Flickr is great for photographers. If you're a keen photographer working only in black and white, or in macro or whatever, you'll find photographers to share your work with. Every photo can be given descriptive tags, or joined to public photo groups. You can then search by tag, or browse groups. e.g.
Every Flickr photo tagged with "londoneye":
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/londoneye/
Group for photos of the City of London:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/cityoflondon/
Flickr is pretty good!
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
flickr is awesome if you need a lot of images. Its very easy to write a script to scrape all of the images for a certain keyword. It is also really nice to use if you just want to manually search for some images with some keywords. Kudos to the people who brough Flickr to the web.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Flickr also sells "pro account" subscriptions for the ability to upload more, no ads, etc. for $24.95 a year: http://flickr.com/upgrade/
there is a certian 'je ne sais quoi' that B/W has. And IMO you lose that if you take a color picture and make it b/w. Just isn't the same.
I have used most of the photoservices and Flickr is by far the best, the folksonomy system is just great.
The interface is nice and simple, the Organize tool is cool, sets are easy to create, and you can easily follow what your contacts are uploading.
Plus set your account to follow other groups/tags/people.
It's really neat, plus it's a great way to archive the photos you display on your site/blog/whatever.
A lot of people do upgrade to the pro account, as the free account only gives you 2 sets, and it's worth the upgrade if you do use flickr a lot.
Share your Knowlege - Kung-Fu Geekery
Good source images and judicious use of photoshop features can produce very good b&w from color images. The main trick is to use a channel mixer adjustment layer instead of just converting the image to greyscale.
I believe the engineer in question is Cal Henderson. Last I heard, he'd just built this to help him get from his new SF home to his desk at Yahoo! HQ.
He spends a fair chunk of time talking about how flickr was built, the notes of which are really interesting for anyone concerned about scaling out a web app.
It's only Exxon in the US. In the rest of the world it's still Esso.
The British English word for a cigarette you are thinking of is fag, not faggot.
In British English a faggot is either a kind of meatball or a bundle of sticks.
There's also another meaning of fag: a younger boy who acts a servant for an older boy at some English public (Amer. Private) schools.
It could be that it's just at Eton or it could be some others but what do I know, I'm only a Grammar School oik.
No but, yeah but, no but...