Flickr
While I had a pretty good idea that Flickr was a photo-oriented social media site, I had never really used it before this project. I had just so happened to try photobucket.com about six years ago, before I discovered any of the other picture-based sites, and have stuck to it for the most part for whenever I needed to imbed a photo. I was kind of initially frustrated with this site when I first started using it because my yahoo account has been inactive for over 4 months, which is their limit before it is inactivated and wiped clean, and so logging on for the first time wasn’t really the most fun experience ever.
Even before this project I’ve always enjoyed looking at sites that aggregate “cool” photos, so once that mini crisis was over, and I finally started to look around it was really hard for me not to at least like the site a little bit. I really enjoyed how they had their “Explore” page set up. I initially gravitated to their “Interesting photos from the last 7 days”, but after I backtracked to look around some more I thought it was even more interesting how you could explore the “interesting photos” from any point in time. The fact that the site offers all of that archived information to the public is something that I thought was really valuable and probably really unique; I don’t know of many sites that allow you to see what was “trending” at certain times in the past.
Although most of the Explore features were pretty cool and allowed you pull from all the photos each time through a different lens, my absolute favorite was probably the “A map of the world” feature. Far too often we see pictures, and have no way of knowing where it came from and often times really anything about it. With this feature, by clicking on a row of photos at the bottom of a page, an enlarged thumbnail pops up, along with the title, the user who uploaded it, and a point on the map is highlighted so that you can see where it’s from. This feature also works in the reverse so that you can point at a random marked on the map, and be directed to the corresponding photo.
Here are two tutorials that are great for getting you started with using Flickr. Both of them are very helpful! In case you don’t actually watch them(: the bottom one had a really cool fun fact at the end: Flickr was originally an online gaming site, but its photo-sharing feature was so successful, the game itself was abandoned.
