What is it? Flickr is a photo sharing web site. The service experienced explosive growth from its inception and was recently purchased by Yahoo, giving it sound financial footing and strong viability into the future. Unlike some other services, you can make the time investment in uploading your digital photographs knowing that the service is most likely around for the long haul. Flickr made its name by marrying photo sharing with online community building and by opening up the site to allow others to write useful additions to the service by grabbing photos from the huge database of user photographs and displaying and interacting with them. Flickr was an early leader in the use of tags to identify pictures by subject. Tagging has since become an essential feature of all types of web sites in which communities share web links, photographs, videos, thoughts, etc.

Who should consider using Flickr? The real strength of Flickr is the openness of its technology which has spawned a huge number of both useful and less useful add-on web services and desktop programs that allow you to interact with your photographs and the photographs others in often very interesting ways. If you enjoy spending time in digging into all of the possibilities possible with Flickr and third party extras, then this the service for you. If you really only want to load pictures and send a link to the grandparents, a service such as Shutterfly will serve you better.

Learning curve. Not very steep to utilize the basic features and quite steep to take full advantage of all that can be done with Flickr and third party add-ins.

What can I do with it? The possibilities are endless, really. Start by loading up your pictures, learn how to organize them in the way that best fits your needs, tag the photos. Invite family and friends to view your pictures. Take a look at some of the other possibilities for enjoying your photos here.

Taking it to the next level. Take a look at all the things that you can do with the addition services and programs that have been written by others to expand the capabilities of Flikr. For pointless fun take a look here. The best add-on that I have found is John’s Background Switcher which fetches photo’s from your Flickr account (or other people’s pictures) and displays them on your computer. If you simply can’t get enough head on over to The Great Flickr Tools Collection for an exhaustive list of things to do with Flickr.

If you would like to dig even deeper, How to Use Flickr: The Digital Photography Revolution is a good book to get you started.