I started using Flickr last night because I’d read so many good things about it. Fil and I had started writing something like this back in the day, but then we moved across the country from one another and found better [paying] things to do.

So far I’ve found it to be pretty good. The killer feature for me, and why I’ve continued using the thing Fil and I wrote to date, is the ability to tag photos with the people in them, so that with one click you can see all the pictures with someone in it over time. Flickr kinda gives that to you via their tagging system.

They also have an exceptional timeline feature so you can see when your photos were taken right along a timeline and zoom in on any of those dates. They read the metadata from your camera, so if you upload your original photos it will know some things about the picture so you don’t have to type them in (like when it was taken). I’ve found that after cropping/shrinking photos with Photoshop I must be stripping out a lot of that information, so I only notice this benefit when I upload originals.

The downside to uploading originals is that it takes more bandwidth to upload a full-size picture, and that’s how Flickr caps off their accounts – you can only upload a certain amount each month. Storage and downloads are unlimited though (so you can eventually have as many pictures as you want up there, and people can look at them as many times as they want).

I’m considering buying the full out membership, but I’m going to give it a little while longer to see if I find anything particularly obnoxious. So, go check it out and see what you think. Most of my pictures are set for friends/family only so you’ll have to sign up to see the majority of them.