After considering it for a long time, yesterday I finally bit the bullet and decided to find out what this whole “flickr” thing is all about. I knew it provided a place to upload pictures to so you could share them with friends. I also knew that you could tag your photos and they’d be searchable by others. I was hesitant to hop on the Flickr bandwagon, though, as I figured the interface would be kludgy, slow, and annoying.
After giving it a whirl, I can definitely say I was wrong. Completely. The interface is actually rather simple, elegant, and powerful. It is also pretty damn fast, too. I found it very intuitive to use, and within minutes was uploading images, sorting them into sets, tagging them, etc. I’ve found it to be a fast and powerful way to store and organize my photos online. I also like it because it’s incredibly easy for me to integrate images from flickr into my website. In fact, if you go to http://john.whelans.net/images/ you’ll see all of my flickr images and image sets there. Very easy.
The only things I found annoying were that 1.) it requires you to sign up for a yahoo! ID, and 2.) the web upload form IS kind of kludgy and slow. The former I can live with, the latter I avoid completely by using a desktop uploader for OS X which allows me to drag images into a queue and do mass uploads. Very slick, very fast, very nice.
If you’ve been thinking about using Flickr, but haven’t signed up for an account yet, you really should.
“The trick is to bang the rocks together, guys”
The newsreader from Hitchhikers
Yes indeed