I uploaded my first picks to Flickr on the 14th of June so thats just over a month ago.
I obviously was pretty much sold on it back then already since I uploaded 700 photos in the following few days, but now I am realizing other things about Flickr that was not apparent during my poking around on it leading up to the uploading of photos.
Mostly the things I’m realizing are about the community on flickr, people really do contribute, comment, make suggestions, post to the forums etc in a very friendly and accommodating way. In short it’s one of the best photo communities I’ve taken part in.
Some stats on my photos hosted there:
| Number of Views: | 10380 |
| Photos with comments: | Difficult to say, > 100 |
| Photos that’s been marked as Favorites: | 73 |
| Photos with > 100 views: | 6 |
| Number of Contacts: | 71 |
| People who list me as Contact: | 59 |
There are some other interesting stats but I think this paints the picture, when I had my photos on a Gallery hosted on my own machine I got loads of hits as well but nothing like on Flickr and those hits were mostly driven from Google and very much a hit-and-run type scenario. No-one left comments or anything, I never had any kind of interaction with those viewers, it’s very different on Flickr and that’s the major selling point.
Flickr has the concept of contacts, you add them, they get a mail that you’ve done so and they can see your photos and choose to add you as a contact too. There is a special page that shows a stream of photos uploaded by your contacts and also an RSS feed. This is great for keeping track of peoples work instead of just following a blog since people tend to upload only their best to a photoblog.
Photos can also belong to groups, there are groups for anything you can imagine, so I tend to send photos to groups like People in Black and White, these groups also have discussion forums.
So to sum up, I’m very happy with the $24.95 I spent to get me on Flickr for a year, it’s been great and it’s changed drastically how I work with my photos, even in strange ways like making it easier to publish to my photoblog which means I do it more often. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for casual photo hosting for family and friends and for anyone interested in a community driven site.
