How do you use Flickr?
I’ve been using Flickr for a few months now and really enjoy it. But, I’ve noticed that there are a couple of trends on how people use it.
Some use Flickr as a way to store ALL of their photos in the cloud - like a backup. Or perhaps as you use it to share pictures with family, perhaps the way it was intended to, where the quality of the image does not matter at all - but the contents of it does. If you have relatives that live across the world, how are you going to show them pictures of your new child, I think we are beyond snail mail at this point.
But lately I have seen Flickr used as a portfolio to showcase people’s best photos - not all of them but the ones that they feel are the best of what they have taken.
Personally I use Flickr to display pretty much any image that I think others, not necessarily friends, would be interested in. I don’t do a lot of editing once taken; I just put them up mostly to show whoever wants to see them. As I previously mentioned, I think that Flickr is primarily geared towards sharing your photographic memories with people you know. Lets face it, most of the tools are designed for that.
While when used as a portfolio it is mainly for critique. Where quite often comments left are about the pictures themselves and not the content.
I think that Flickr remains a healthy community with both types of users, and to tell you the truth I always enjoy looking at the “portfolio” Flickr streams - some of the stuff these guys are capable of is amazing.
How do use Flickr and why?
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I use flickr as a kind of backup - at least that’s how it started out - and for sharing photos with friends and family - and that continues to be my main use. But I have found myself taking care with some photos to edit them and make them the best possible - especially by using the picnik editor which is built in to flickr. Mainly I crop and adjust exposure (contrast and colour). Recently I have been editing some of my surfing photos from last summer, and with a bit of care they really do improve. But I still like to get photos up as quickly as possible - and often I’m not over picky - so, for example, I’ve just uploaded about 170 hockey photos. Now to be fair I did take over 400 so I have trimmed them down some, but that’s still a lot of photos. But I find it difficult to decide whether a photo is good or bad - once I’ve discarded the obvious duds; because some of the photos I don’t like, some people seem to think are really good - and probably vice versa. I now have over 11,000 photos on flickr with nearly 36,000 views. Some of them should be good! Yet it annoys me that there are over 1,000 of my photos which have not been viewed even once. And it annoys me even more that some people get huge numbers of views and massive number of comments and favourites for images which don’t seem to be all that great. And even worse are the people who seem to repeatedly post the same images, or the same type of photoshop manipulation (eg false sunsets).
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:32 pmHmm, well, I use it to show what I feel are some of my better images, but I also use it in a way that I don’t think you mentioned, and it’s kind of like a blog. I’ll often post, say a picture of my desk, and have a long caption underneath of what’s going on these days.
Also, when I went to NYC, each picture I uploaded from there had a very long story that I recalled from looking at that picture. See what I mean: http://flickr.com/charlies
Anyway, I also think it’s nice to know that I have full resolution copies, (albeit JPEGs), on there, and now that it does video too, that’s another thing to share!
Charlie - http://theapblog.com/
April 9th, 2008 at 10:57 am