Using flickr

I am already quite familiar with flickr; I do some photography as a hobby and I have an account there with a large number of my photos already. I pay flickr's yearly fee so people can see more than 200 of my photos.

Of all the 'social' web applications, flickr was the first one I ever joined, so I wasn't used to its 'contacts', 'groups' etc. I was a big skeptic when it came to social web applications. Since using other social applications, I find that I wish flickr had more privacy control. I'd love it if I could prevent certain parts of my profile or certain photos from being viewed externally (such as by Google's indexer), or set viewing rights for my photos on a per-contact basis (so I can show a picture to a certain person).

As a result of having photos on flickr I occasionally get comments from other people who are into photography. This is encouraging. I have also had 3 photos which were published in magazines - one in print, the other two online. The publishers found my photos by searching flickr based on the tags I had used and, in one case, the Creative Commons license I had given the photo.

If you want your photos to be found, I would recommend adding relevant tags to them. That way, someone who is doing a search for a particular Melbourne landmark is likely to find your photo of that landmark. I'd also recommend submitting them to relevant groups, so Melbourne photos can go to the Melbourne group, and so on.

Picture Australia (from the National Library) has created 2 flickr groups which encourage people to upload photos of people, places and events, and their town. The idea is that selected photos from these groups will become a part of Picture Australia's image collection. I haven't contributed anything yet, though there's no reason I shouldn't - I have plenty of photos of 'my town'. If you feel like contributing photos to Picture Australia would give you a warm fuzzy feeling then do have a look at the information on their site. I think I might get involved.