Flickr your photos
[September 2005] One thing community groups often want to do is take and share photos. Your conference, new committee, fundraising day, end of year picnic — whatever the occasion you might like to take some photos. And having collected a memory card full of photos, what do you do with them?
If you have a website you might share them that way, but many websites aren't really set up to share photos in bulk. You could also email the photos to everyone, but as we've mentioned before, email attachments are becoming increasingly problematic. So how about looking into Flickr?
Flickr offers two levels of service: free and paid. It's easy to add your photos, make them public or keep them just for friends and family, and even to add a photo link from your own website to your Flickr album.
On top of that, you can add 'tags' (keywords) to your photos, meaning visitors from around the world can find your photos and make connections with you. This is a great community-building technique.
What's more Flickr provides automatic RSS news feeds so people can subscribe to your albums and automatically receive the photos, or even subscribe to feeds of all photos related to a particular topic from all Flickr users.
For example, after seeing a recent TV documentary, I searched on the word 'thalidomide'. That brought me to two photos, while a search on 'wheelchair' found 532.
We have a small, experimental album on Flickr, and you're welcome to use ours to give it a try before you sign up for yourself. Email information@community.net.nz and ask for the password.