Flickr - almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world - has two main goals:
1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
Maybe they want to keep a blog of moments captured on their
cameraphone, or maybe they want to show off their best pictures or video
to the whole world in a bid for web celebrity. Or maybe they want to
securely and privately share photos of their kids with their family
across the country. Flickr makes all these things possible and more!
To do this, we want to get photos and video into and out of the system in as many ways as we can:
from the web, from mobile devices, from the users' home computers and
from whatever software they are using to manage their content. And we
want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the
Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or
ways we haven't thought of yet. What else are we going to use those
smart refrigerators for?
2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.
Once you make the switch to digital, it is all too easy to get
overwhelmed with the sheer number of photos you take or videos you shoot
with that itchy trigger finger. Albums, the principal way people go
about organizing things today, are great -- until you get to 20 or 30 or
50 of them. They worked in the days of getting rolls of film developed,
but the "album" metaphor is in desperate need of a Florida condo and
full retirement.
Part of the solution is to make the process of organizing photos or
videos collaborative. In Flickr, you can give your friends, family, and
other contacts permission to organize your stuff - not just to add
comments, but also notes and tags. People like to ooh and ahh, laugh and
cry, make wisecracks when sharing photos and videos. Why not give them
the ability to do this when they look at them over the internet? And as
all this info accretes as metadata, you can find things so much easier
later on, since all this info is also searchable.
Flickr continues to evolve in myriad ways, all of which are designed to make it easier and better. Check out the
Flickr Blog
to stay apprised of the latest developments. The fact that you've read
to the end of this entire document and are hanging out at the bottom of
this page with nothing but this silly text to keep you company is proof
of a deep and abiding interest on your part. What are you waiting for?