What is Flickr?

This feature is for the newbie bloggers and amateur photographers, mostly because hardcore bloggers and professional photographers probably already know about Flickr. It’s a wildly popular website that allows you to share your uploaded photos and videos with your friends for free - in a nutshell - but it’s so much more than that!

I want in!

I initially created my Flickr account to have all the photos I really wanted to share on my blog in one place, all neat and tidy like – one of the best bits is being able to embed a slideshow on your blog – all you need to do is click "share" link when you're in Slideshow mode.)

After using the photo-sharing service, I soon realised that Flickr is a community in and of itself. I slowly started gathering more friends and contacts and suddenly it wasn’t a blogging tool anymore. I’ve made some amazing friends and it doesn’t matter that my photos aren’t what you’d consider ‘professional’ – I’ve found people that enjoy looking at them regardless.

How to...

It’s amazingly easy to create your profile. Click on the “Sign up now” link and get started! Pretty soon you’ll be uploading pics and sharing comments with other like-minded people.

Once you’ve created your profile, have a look around.

Make some friends and browse some photos by clicking the ‘Explore’ link, usually to be found on the bottom and top of your home page. Also on your home page you’ll find all the recent activity by your contacts - whether it’s on your photostream or theirs, a random list of your contacts, friends suggestions and a quick link to the upload page.

Right at the top of the Flickr home page you’ll find a more in-depth menu that’ll take you to your photostream, sets, gallery, archive, favourites etc. Here you’ll also find the option to organise and edit your photos, view your contacts and their profiles and the groups you belong to. Kind of like Facebook - only a camera exploded all over it. And believe me, if you can navigate Facebook this will be easy peasy.

I mentioned earlier that it’s free, and it is, but there’s an upload limit of two videos and 300MB worth of photos that resets each calendar month for the free users. But if you’re looking for more space, you can upgrade to a Pro account that allows you unlimited uploads.

It’s an incredibly diverse and easy-to-use website and you can control how active you want to be within the communities, maybe you only want to use it as a blogging tool? No problem!

Using Flickr, you can connect your Flickr account and send real-time updates to Facebook when you upload public photos, upload directly to Flickr and Twitter simultaneously, or tweet a photo from your Flickr photostream. You can even post from Flickr directly to your blog by setting up a connection and presto! Photoblog!

If you’ve been looking for the perfect photo or video sharing website, Flickr is definitely the one to try...

Happy uploading!