Flickr

Flickr is the next best thing after sliced bread, I heard one comment. Indeed, this on-line photo/image organizer is one of the best produced tools available on the internet nowadays, not only in its niche.

It is a site to upload your photos and images and share with your friends and general public. It has a simple social networking embebbed into it, so it's simple to keep updated with your friend's new uploads. The free account allows 10MB of uploads per month, which for most people converts into something around 20 pictures (with moderate quality) a month. You may subscribe paying an annual fee of U$29.95, which gives unlimited uploads and other benefits.

The most superb about Flickr is probably its wide variety of upload tools. You may submit your pictures through the web, through e-mail, through Windows and MacOS X, by Linux command line...

Another great advantage is its open API. You may create new applications that communicate with Flickr. For example, there is this flickr which uses a software to blend images with similar tags found in Flickr. A very nice effect.

Pictures mays be organized in albums (sets) and may be viewed ordered in a photostream. You may also create a "flickr band", which is a piece of code that you may paste into your site or blog to show your most recent pictures uploaded. To keep updated on what happens, Flickr provides RSS feeds to most of its content, so you may be easily notified if some friend post a new picture or if someone place a comment on yours.

The site has large portions made in Flash, which makes possible to make annotations directly over any picture. The drawback is that the site is sometimes sluggish in slow machines, something increasingly common on the web. Of course, one can create a software using Flickr's API to show pictures in a clean way.

All in all, Flickr is the best on-line organizer available and a definite alternative to fotolog and other related sites.

Comments: