The whole inspiration behind Flickr is social. Yes, it’s a site that lets you store your photos and videos online, but if that were the end of it, Flickr would be a very small site indeed.

Instead, Flickr provides you with a way to share photos and videos with your friends and family, no matter where they are located. You could do things the old way, and have copies made of all your photos and laboriously send them out to various people through the mail.

Or you could simply post your photos and videos on Flickr and then tell your friends and family about them, inviting them to take a look.

Besides your own friends and family, Flickr is a terrific place to make new friends. You can search Flickr for photos and videos you’re interested in and leave comments about those photos and videos. You can even add the people who took those photos and videos as friends on Flickr.

All of which is to say that Flickr is a social place, and you should take advantage of that.

Flickr is all about sharing photos, and there are tons of ways of finding photos on Flickr. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Exploring Flickr

If you’re just getting into Flickr, the Explore page is a good place to start. The Flickr staff routinely browses photos that members have uploaded and labeled Public and posts the most interesting ones on the Explore page.

You can find the Explore page by clicking the Explore link that appears on every Flickr page or by navigating your browser to www.flickr.com/explore/, as shown in Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1. The Flickr Explore page.

Want to see another Explore photo? Just reload the page, and it’ll cycle through all the photos the Flickr staff has recently labeled as interesting.

Exploring the Most Recent Photos

Flickr also presents a list of photos that always stays fresh: the Most Recent Photos and Videos list. This list displays the most recently uploaded photos.

You can see the Most Recent Photos and Videos at www.flickr.com/photos/, as shown in Figure 4.2.

Figure 4.2. The Flickr Most Recent Photos and Videos page.

The thumbnails on the Most Recent Photos and Videos page are hard to make out. To see the whole photo, click its thumbnail, opening the photo in its own page, as shown in Figure 4.3.

Figure 4.3. A bigger version of a photo.

As you know, Flickr stores photos in various sizes. If you want to see the full photo with its larger dimension set to 1024 pixels, click the All Sized link you see above the photo in Figure 4.3. Doing so opens the large version of the photo shown in Figure 4.4.

Figure 4.4. All versions of a photo.

The other image sizes are provided with links; click a link to see the photo in that size. For example, here are the sizes for the image shown in Figure 4.4:

• Square (75×75)

• Thumbnail (100×67)

• Small (240×160)

• Medium (500×333)

• Large (1024×681)

• Original (3008×2000)

Tip

The photo in its original size is available only for photos stored in Pro accounts.

Another popular Explore page is the most interesting photos of the last 7 days, which you can find at www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ (see Figure 4.5).

Figure 4.5. The most interesting photos of the last 7 days.

These photos are selected by the Flickr staff.

Tip

You can also take a look at the current photo that the Flickr staff considers has the most “interestingness” at www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/.

Searching by Tag

You can also explore all the public photos on Flickr by tag. To do so, use the search box you find at the upper right on most Flickr pages, such as in Figure 4.6.

Figure 4.6. The search box.

You can select how to search by clicking the drop-down arrow to the right of the search box and selecting from these options:

• Everyone’s Uploads (the default)

• From Your Contacts

• From Your Friends

• Your Photostream

• Groups

• Flickr Members

• For a Location

For example, suppose that you’re remembering fondly your most recent trip to Europe and want to search for photos of Austria. Type Austria into the search box and press Enter, which yields the results you see in Figure 4.7.

Figure 4.7. Search results.

Tip

Want to find out what tags are the hottest in terms of searches? Go to Hot Tags: www.flickr.com/photos/tags/. Want to search by geotagged location? Select For a Location in the search box before performing your search.

Say that you’ve found a photo you like, such as the one in Figure 4.8.

Figure 4.8. Comments.

Note the comments that appear under the photo, each showing the commenter’s buddy icon and comment text.

Flickr comments are an integral part of the sharing process. Comments are Flickr’s way of letting others create minidiscussions about photos. Leaving and reading comments gets you involved in the Flickr community.

Want to add your own comment and join the discussion? Just scroll to the bottom of the comments list, as shown in Figure 4.9.

Figure 4.9. Adding a comment.

Enter your comment into the Add Your Comment box; click the Preview button to see a preview of your comment, or click the Post Comment button to post your comment directly.

We’ve mentioned a lot about contacts, friends, and family on Flickr. Now it’s time to start putting that work.

So what’s the difference between contacts, friends, and family? Here’s your answer:

Suppose, for example, that you’re looking at someone’s photostream, such as the one in Figure 4.10, and want to add that person as a contact.

Figure 4.10. A photostream.

It’s easy: Just click the Add xxxxxxxxx as a Contact link in the person’s photostream or profile, where xxxxxxxxx is the person’s name. When you click that link, a dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 4.11.

Figure 4.11. Adding someone as a contact.

This is the dialog box you use to add someone as a contact, as a friend, or as a family member (or all). The three check boxes in the dialog box let you specify what level you’re adding the new contact as:

After you’ve specified your selection, click the Add Contact button.

The person is added as one of your contacts. You’ll be able to see that person’s recent activity in Flickr on the Contacts page. (To see the Contacts page, click the Contacts link visible on every Flickr page.) The Contacts page appears in Figure 4.12, and you can see the new contact’s recent uploads.

Figure 4.12. The Contacts page.

Note that the person you made a contact will get an email. Here’s what that email will look like:

Congratulations—you’ve just added a new contact.

Now that you’ve seen how to add people as contacts, how about finding your pals on Flickr? Or if they’re not already on Flickr, how about inviting them to join?

You can do both—and we’ll take a look at both topics, finding friends and inviting friends, next.

Searching for Friends

To search for friends you want to add as contacts, go to your home page and click the Find Your Friends on Flickr link that you can see in Figure 4.13.

Figure 4.13. The home page.

Clicking the Find Your Friends on Flickr link opens the page shown in Figure 4.14.

Figure 4.14. The Find Your Friends page.

You can also reach this page at www.flickr.com/import/people/.

There are actually two ways to search for friends, as you can see on the page in Figure 4.14. The first way is to search your email address book for friends who are already on Flickr. The second way is to search Flickr for the names of your friends.

If you have an email address book with Yahoo!, Gmail, or Hotmail, you can have Flickr search for all the email addresses in your address book to see if any of those people have Flickr accounts. Just select the email address book type on the left on the Find Friends page, click the Go button, and follow the directions.

If you want to search for friends by name, enter his name in the search box at the bottom of the page and click the Search button. Clicking the buddy icon of those people you find opens their photostream, which lets you determine whether you’ve found the right person—and add them as a contact if so.

Figure 4.15. Search results.

On the other hand, not all your friends are going to have Flickr accounts. How about inviting your off-Flickr friends to join Flickr?

When you’ve got a number of contacts, it pays to be able to manage them. You might want to see all your contacts in list form (for example, showing their most recent activity).

In addition, you might want to change whether any of your contacts are specified as friends or family.

You can do these things and manage your contacts with the Contact List page. Just follow these steps:

Want to change a contact’s friend or family status?

Just click the Friend & Family (Edit) link to open the page you see shown in Figure 4.18.

Figure 4.18. Editing a contact.

You can make the changes you want to the contact’s name and click the OK button to save the contact’s new status.

While we’re on the Contact List page, click the Around You link in the Activity section at the bottom of the page to open the page shown in Figure 4.19.

Figure 4.19. The activity around you.

This page lists the recent activities that concern your account. (If you’re familiar with Facebook, this is Flickr’s analog to the Facebook minifeed.)

You already know you can set the privacy of your photos when you upload them. Now that you’re adding friends and family to your contacts list, you might want to edit the privacy settings of your photos after they’ve been uploaded—no use letting Aunt Jane see that slightly ridiculous Christmas party picture.

You can edit the privacy settings of any photo in your photostream—and you can set who can comment and add tags, too. Just follow these steps:

Not everyone you invite to join Flickr to see your photos will want to actually join Flickr. Is there a way to let your invitees see the photos marked for friends and/or family anyway?

Yes, there is: You can give them a Flickr guest pass. You can issue a guest pass for any set that has some or all of its photos marked nonpublic. (Non-Flickr members can always see public photos.)

Suppose, for instance, that you have a set with some private photos and want to issue a guest pass to someone so he can see the set without being a member of Flickr. Here’s how it works:

These directions send an email with an automatic guest pass to anyone.

You can also get a link to your set (and make sure the link has a guest pass built in). Just click the Grab link, click the check boxes to make the guest pass (Friends, Family, or Private), and copy the link, which you can then send to people yourself.

You can also block people from having anything to do with you on Flickr. When you block people, they:

You can block a person by going to their profile page (go to their photostream and click the Profile link) and clicking the Block This Person? link. That’s all it takes.

Note that people you block are not notified that you’ve blocked them.

This lesson started our discussion about sharing photos on Flickr. You learned how to look at other people’s public photos. You also saw how to search for friends and make people into contacts, including friends and family. You learned how to share photos, even with non-Flickr members, using a guest pass. Finally, you saw how to block people from any interaction with you on Flickr.