This is a shameless plug for Flickr. (No, they are not paying me for this.)
May I be honest with you? If you share your photos online and you’re NOT using Flickr — you’re not kool! Ok, I can forgive you if you’re using the Flickr wannabe Zooomr, or overpriced pro services from SmugMug or PhanFare…but other than that, I must be blunt — you suck =D (Of course, you know I’m just joking. Unless I really know you, then I cannot justifiably say you suck LOL) From my research of the photo sharing services that are available, Flickr is the best of them all! After all, Flickr is the award winning photo sharing community that Time Magazine called “completely addictive” 
Why? One word: community.
It is the buzz word of our times, especially in today’s postmodern emerging generation where we want church and our experience of the Christian faith to be genuine and missional. Flickr is so popular because it focuses its photo sharing on sharing with the world-wide community of photographers — you don’t just post your photos online to share with your friends, but you share your hard work with like-minded photographers around the world. This provides the opportunity for mutual edification — building each other up, encouraging one another, critiquing each other’s photos, giving constructive criticism where appropriate.
How does Flickr do this? I could think of 3 ways.
- Blogging
- Groups (photo Pools, discussions)
- Commenting & Favorite’ing
- Explore
1. Blogging
With Flickr, it’s very easy to share your photos on your blog — especially since Flickr automatically creates different sizes of each photo you upload! So, if you have a domain for a photoblog, you can even save on webhosting space and bandwidth by having your Flickr photos shared there!
2. Groups
There are many groups on Flickr, created by users on just about any conceivable topic/idea (doesn’t even need to be about photography). Here you can discuss each others photos, and “Send To” the group’s Pool so you can see each other’s photos! It’s an easy way to collaborate and share photos from an event.
3. Commenting & Favoriting
How can you sense a community unless you have conversations? Along with discussions in Flickr Groups, Flickr gives you the ability to Comment and Favorite on photos you like (or dislike). It’s great way to help each other grow as photographers and tell each other what we really think of their still captures!
4. Explore (Interestingness)
Explore is unlike anything else I have ever seen on any other photo sharing service. If you’re ever bored, go to the Explore page. Flickr has a feature (algorithm really) called “Interestingness” that ranks photos upload according to where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags; etc. It’s all done by the Flickr servers, so that everyday you visit Explore, you can see the most interesting photos on Flickr! How kool is that =D
Flickr certainly has many areas of its service which it can improve on. It’s far from perfect. But since it is an entity of Yahoo!, it has the resources to be anything we the users want it to be!
Check out these reviews from other websites:
