Flickr

Flickr is an online photo management system - allows you to store photos, share them, as well as publish directly to blogs from their website. When i first started my photoblog, i looked at flickr as an option to Hello. Did not really like it then ... wasn't too impressed. Then along came Google's Picassa photo management system, and it was smooth, together with picassa and hello working so nicely with blogger!

however i have been 're-evaluating' flickr these past 2-3 months, especially news was out that Yahoo bought Flickr. That meant two things - one was that Flickr probably had something I had missed, they wouldnt spend so much cash buying them out, or that Flickr had gotten much better since I last used it. And guess what, both of them probably, certainly the latter!! flickr certainly rocks. The interface is elegant and clean. Having a photo management system online is no mean task, and the standards set by desktop clients are very high, especially since the advent of Picassa. But Flickr has really set the bar very high for web based photo management - it is after all sooooooo much better than current websites such as yahoo! photos or sony's imagestation. Flickr's blog says:

Are you going to become Yahoo Photos?
No. Yahoo Photos will get a lot of Flickr features, and there are alot of other areas around Yahoo that will also be Flickrized where Flickrization would be good. Yahoo Photos and Flickr have different kinds of users with different needs, and will remain separate for the foreseeable future. Flickr would also suffer from a sudden deluge of LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! omg! so we're going to grow it carefully.

And the public seems to have caught on to it big time. and imean big time .... Flickr just received its 17 millionth photograph [via Amit Karmakar]!! Its fun to even browse through photo collections of Flickr, the photosets are spectacular, the interface is easy, and for bloggers - its extremely easy to post to your own blog from flickr, whether its powered by blogger or typepad or wordpress or livejournal or movable type! Amit also gives a nice list of things he would like to see on Flickr - this includes faster download times, more useful messages for blogs when flickr is down and the ability for taking backups. things i love about flickr include easy editing and uploading, easy management, easy blogging, tags, ease of searching, and even creative commons licensing and RSS support.

i would certainly encourage everyone to try out flickr. one thing is for certain, yahoo buying flickr has certainly upped the stakes, and i would expect google to follow suit with something as good. and just as with gmail, we the consumers might be the ones who are able to reap the benefits of the yahoo-google tussle! personally, im even considering purchasing their 'pro' account (paid subscription to their services)!

in the meantime, i will leave you with a picture from my flickr page. Its a collage of pictures I took during a visit to Pune earlier this year.

you can access my flickr page here.