Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Sharing Photos and Hobbies: Flickr

As an adjunct to Yahoo Groups, Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) is a place where photo buffs, dog buffs, Porsche buffs, and just about every other imaginable kind of buffs share their photos and passions. You can use Flickr to share photos with your family, but be warned: Technophobic relatives won’t find Flickr as easy to use as, say, EasyShare or Snapfish. Flickr originated as the digital brainchild of photosnapping computer geeks, and it still falls short in user-friendliness.

Flickr’s Many Ways to Share

Before you can share photos on Flickr, you must upload them, as described in Section 6.9.1. Once you upload a photo, you have a bunch of ways to decide who gets to see it online. Your options, in order from most paranoid to let-it-all-hang-out, are as follows:

• Private. You, and only you, can see this photo on Flickr, unless you grant access to specific people (from your Contacts list, as described in the next section). You can make photos private if you’re just using Flickr to temporarily store photos so you can clear your memory card (or if you’re not sure you want Web-surfing co-workers to stumble upon a shot of you in a swimsuit).

  

  Figure 14-8. When you want to invite friends and family to see your photos, you can use Snapfish to send them an email. They don’t have to create an account to view your pictures, but Snapfish usually offers them an ...