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I just uploaded a photo to Flickr that brings the size of my archive to one thousand photos. That’s a lot and it confirms my belief that Flickr is a killer app. It’s actually changed the way that I think about photos and I’m taking a lot more. There are many ways to upload and share photos, but what makes Flickr great is the social component. When I started uploading pictures I was thinking that it was a great way to share photos with my family as it just didn’t make any more sense to keep emailing the same photos around all of the time. The other thing is that I didn’t want to upload photos of the kids and family events for the world. Sharing pictures with the family worked great, but it wasn’t until I started getting comments on my public photos and started participating in groups that I really started to get more heavily addicted.
What is wonderful about Flickr is that you can connect with people from around the world and communicate visually. You find people who have a similar visual sensibility to you. Now if someone adds me as a contact I look at their photos to try and figure out why. Usually it only takes a few images to figure out what you share in common, whether it is an interest in things that are rusting, similar framing or topics. I look forward to seeing the images that my contacts have uploaded and I want to share more.
The other thing that this sharing has encouraged me to do is more fully embrace Creative Commons licensing as all of my public photos have an “attribution-NonCommercial” license. I love being part of a community that communicates through images.
