What is Flickr & why should we use it
Flickr is probably the world’s most innovative and popular photo sharing website in the world. It is owned by Yahoo! and has both a free and paid service for you to utilise.
Flickr sums up their service perfectly on their website:
“Flickr is the WD-40 that makes it easy to get photos or video from one person to another in whatever way they want.”
Not only is it used to upload and store photos online but it also allows them to be tagged, put into galleries and then shared with family and friends.
Businesses have also discovered that rather than host the images on their own servers, they can use Flickr as their image database and hence their websites pull images from Flickr rather than where the rest of the website is hosted. Clever isn’t it (we will come back as to how you can do that in a future lesson).
Why Should You Use it?
Businesses (and individuals) should be using this service because it allows you to manage all your organisation’s photos in one safe and secure portal.
Particular industries that benefit the most are:
- Photographers
- Graphic Designers
- Printing Companies
- Wedding Planners
- Event Management
- Charities
- Modelling
Flickr also integrates seamlessly with many of the other social networks (Facebook. Blogs, Twitter, etc) by getting your web developer to insert Flickr specific pieces of code onto your existing website.
Most of all, you can access it also anywhere you are in the world from almost any device with the ability to take photos and connect with the Internet.
