Flickr-ing Photos

I’ve always been a fanatic behind the camera, and these days, even more so with the advancements and convenience of digital photography. I never leave home without my digital camera.

To share my photos with friends and family, I was previously using Apple’s web photo sharing service, but have to pay an annual fee for a very limited amount of space. Although I knew about Flickr for awhile, I just started using it about a month ago. It’s a free photo sharing service, and I use it as a photo blog and frequently update it with the pics I snap around town.

Flickr, from Yahoo!, is probably the best free way to share your photos with the people who matter to you. It allows you to store, sort, search and share your photos online. Once you sign-up, you will receive your own link to your personalized photo collection, the ability to setup contacts between your friends and family, and you don’t need to worry about security. You can set permissions on each picture to be public or private (with a further option to be only viewed by friends or only viewed by family).

For the free account, it allows you to upload 20 megabytes of photos per month. That can go far, especially if you upload your pictures in a small size. The free option also gives you three photosets (albums), which you maintain with Flickr’s Organizr program. If you pay a nominal fee of $24.95 a year, you can upgrade to the Pro account. Pro allows you to upload up to 2 gigabytes of photos per month, unlimited total storage and photosets, permanent archiving of your high resolution images and ad-free browsing and sharing.

Uploading photos is simple with the free downloadable software. There’s even a plug-in for iPhoto (Mac), which is what I use. You can even upload photos with your camera phone or via e-mail. If you have a blog, you can also use Flickr as the storage for your blog’s photos. It works with just about any site such as Blogger (which I recently wrote about), LiveJournal, Movable Type or Manila.

Check out Flickr for yourself at www.flickr.com.