Flickr encourages its members to tag their photos with keywords—text labels—to make them easier to find. (For more about tagging your own pictures, see Section 13.2.2.4.) For example, if you’re looking for photos of Paris, type paris in the box on the Flickr home page. Flickr puts tagged photos from a broad category into clusters, or subsets of the larger set (see Figure 13-1).

Figure 13-1. Flickr helps you dig through your search results by further grouping images into clusters, or subsets.

So when you get hundreds of Paris photos back from your search, look for a link for “Paris clusters” on the side of the page, which leads you to a page of more specific shots, like sacre coeur or louvre or seine, to drill down further. Click a photo thumbnail to see a larger version of it with more information, like the date it was taken, how many times it’s been viewed, and any comments people have left.

Each photo thumbnail on a search results page has a link to its photographer underneath as well, so you can go right to the person’s own Flickr collection (called a photostream) to see more. Each photostream can be divided up into sets by its owner, so you can hone in on a roundup of similar pictures like “airborne cats” or shots of fancy club chairs.

Flickr members can also see and join groups, which collaborate on pools of photos on a certain theme—say, Altered Signs (creative graffiti) or Rural Decay (rusting barns). Group members can upload contributions and post messages on public forums.

Flickr is especially great for finding photos of extremely current or offbeat events, because people can snap photos with their cellphone cameras and send them directly to their Flickr pages without having to stop and use a computer. Its freshness, along with its freeness and tagging features, make it easy to find quirky collections devoted to say, street art or underground events like New York’s annual Idiotarod race (where, instead of dogs and sleds, costumed teams of people push decorative, “borrowed” shopping carts along in a madcap race through Brooklyn and Manhattan). (To see some hysterical race-day coverage, search Flickr for idiotarod, as shown in Figure 13-1.)

If you have a Flickr membership, you can tag certain photos as favorites and send messages to other members with Flickr Mail. The Flickr staff itself helps round up the most interesting photos it can find each month and posts them on the Explore Flickr page, which is sort of a snapshot of all the different kinds of snapshots it’s added in the last 30 days.

Flickr may not be your best choice if you need a picture of Henry Ford for your school report on American industry, but it’s a great place to go to see a slice of life—even if it’s not your own.

To find pictures of something specific, type into the search box—Tom Cruise, say, or Sony HC3. Even Google can’t “see” a photo, recognizing what’s in it; it can only search the names of photos on the Web and whatever text keywords their creators have associated with them. (Google also takes a peek at text surrounding an image, deducing, for example, that a page with an unlabeled picture and a line of text that says “Look at my beautiful panda” probably contains an image of a panda.)

After you click Search, Google Images brings back a results page full of little thumbnail images, as shown in Figure 13-2.

Figure 13-2. Type your keywords into Google Image Search and the little search engine that could goes out and finds all sorts of pictures for you. Each image in your search results comes with a bit of information like the size of the file and where Google found it.

Each thumbnail tells you something about the picture, like the file name, how big the file is, and where it originally came from. Click the thumbnail to go to the original page, where you can see the image at its full size and in its intended context. Getting linked back to the original page is quite useful if you’re doing both photo and text research on a topic because the links often lead back to articles on the subject of your image search.

Google Images knows about photo files in the .JPG, .GIF, and .PNG formats (see the box in Section 13.2 for more about file formats). In addition to photographs, search results may include maps, charts, diagrams, and graphics. Search for pantheon, for example, and you get thousands of pictures of the old Roman temple, plus floor plans, cross sections, and virtual 3-D models of the building.

Getting so many results for general topics is more of a bad thing than a good one because you may have to wade through page after page looking for what you had in mind. To narrow things down a bit, here are a few tricks of the image-search trade:

Google generally tries to weed out pornographic images, but a few may occasionally slip through, depending on how you worded your search. You can use settings on the Advanced Search page to up the filtering to “strict” (in an attempt to screen out more of Those Types of Images) or turn filtering off entirely (if adult material is, in fact, what you’re looking for).

As mentioned earlier in the chapter, Flickr (www.flickr.com ) is a great place to find photos, but you can also use it to share your own. With a Flickr account, you can upload photos from your computer, send photos straight onto your page by emailing them, or send them directly from your camera-equipped cellphone; Flickr supplies you with the email address needed to post the images. You can order prints from a Flickr partner and, if you have your own blog (Section 19.1), you can also send copies of your pix right to your Web journal as well.

A free Flickr account lets you upload 20 megabytes’ worth of pictures a month. Flickr doesn’t measure that 20 megabytes by the amount of space your pictures take up on a hard drive, though, but by how much bandwidth you take up to get them online. Bandwidth is the amount of data you can transfer over a network from one computer to another.

So why should you care about the bandwidth limit? Because the site’s keeping tabs on your bandwidth usage—and not the amount of hard drive space you’re occupying—deleting photos you’ve already uploaded doesn’t give you the ability to add more pictures if you’ve already hit your monthly bandwidth allowance. You either have to wait until the bandwidth meter is reset the first day of each month or give Flickr some money for an upgraded account.

If you choose a paid Flickr account for $25 a year, you get two gigabytes of uploads, unlimited photo sets ( Flickr’s version of the “album” feature in most photo organizer programs), ad-free pages, and permanent storage for archiving your high-resolution shots. (Free accounts get only three photo sets and can display only the 200 most recent photos.)

Once you’re signed in to Flickr, you’re ready to upload photos. Click the Upload link at the top of the page. The site gives you two ways to upload your pictures. You can use the Web form on the Upload page to manually select and tag six pictures at a time, as shown in Figure 13-3, or you can download the free Flickr Uploadr program that lets you put up a pile of pictures all at once. There’s a link for the Flickr Uploadr on the main Upload page, and the software works with most versions of Windows and Mac OS X 10.3 or later.

Figure 13-3. Flickr gives you a Web form to upload six pictures at a time from your computer to the site. To add a photo, click the Browse button and navigate to the place it lives on your hard drive. Once you select the image and tell Flickr to upload it, a copy of the picture is added to your photostream (Section 13.1.1).

Using Flickr’s privacy settings, you can restrict pictures to just people you designate as Family, just Friends (in case you don’t want your Family to see those shots of you with the lampshade on your head), or both.

Once you’ve got your photos uploaded, you can use the Flickr Organizr to arrange them in sets or pools (Section 13.1.1). There’s a lot more fun on Flickr, so the best way to see it all is to sign up and dive in.

If you want to make things with your photos (including prints) as well as share them online, Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) has plenty of projects for you. Like Flickr, you can either upload photos through Shutterfly’s Web page or with free utility software provided by the site after you’ve signed up and created a Shutterfly account. You can do basic photo editing with the site’s free tools, like crop images, apply color effects and borders, reduce red eye, and add captions to your images.

When you upload your pictures, the site guides you through sending out email invitations for people to come see the photos at your own Web page address, with optional password protection. People on your list have the opportunity to order prints of your work from Shutterfly, so Grandma can take matters into her own hands if she feels she’s not getting enough action shots of the grandkids to suit her.

You can make all sorts of things out of your uploaded photos and order the finished products: photo books, calendars, coffee mugs, T-shirts, tote bags, playing cards, mouse pads, coasters, jigsaw puzzles, and more. All kinds of photo albums and brag books are available, too; you can even reproduce a photo on canvas with fade-resistant inks. For about $150, that shot of the two of you at the Left Bank café on your honeymoon can become a 24 x 36-inch framed portrait hanging over the couch.

Snapfish (www.snapfish.com) doesn’t care if you don’t have a digital camera. It politely offers to process your 35mm and APS film rolls, send you prints and negatives, and put all the pictures online—all for $3 and mailing costs.

If you do have a digital camera, you can upload your images right from your computer, email them from a computer or cameraphone, and order prints.

A Snapfish account is free and lets you store as many pictures as you’d like. You can let your friends and family see your online albums in the usual way: sending them an email invitation with a Web link and a password. Like Shutterfly, you have basic image-editing tools at your disposal to crop, rotate, and adjust colors in your pictures.

Along with film processing, Snapfish makes its cash by selling you all sorts of objects adorned with your images—mini-soccer balls, shirt-wearing teddy bears, golf towels, candy tins, boxer shorts, baby bibs, pillowcases, and more—to show off your photographic efforts on a variety of surfaces.

Kodak’s online gallery (the sharing site formerly known as Ofoto) adds a sense of history to the notion of Web-based picture pages. Kodak, after all, has been in the consumer photography business since 1888, which is plenty of time to figure out how people like to take and share pictures. It even offers famous archival images from Life magazine for sale in its gallery pages, including the photograph of Margaret Bourke-White snapping pictures atop the Chrysler Building, an astronaut walking on the moon, and a cow wearing a cowboy hat (Figure 13-4).

Figure 13-4. In addition to giving your photos an online home, Kodak offers to sell you vintage Life magazine reproductions in a variety of sizes. Of course, you can also order prints of your own pictures, too.

To get started on the personal part of the Kodak Gallery, sign up for a free account at www.kodakgallery.com. (If you have a Kodak digital camera, the EasyShare software that came with it makes it easy to upload your pictures to your EasyShare Gallery page.)

With your free account all set up, you can upload images one at a time at the Web site, or in batches with special Mac or Windows software. Like Snapfish, Kodak also accepts and processes film rolls by mail for a few bucks; it will automatically park digital copies of the resulting prints on your EasyShare page for you.

You can send out invitations to select viewers, enhance your images with basic editing tools, and create online slideshows from your pictures. If you like one of your pictures so much you want to carry it around with you like a wallet photo, you can transfer your photos to your cellphone with the Kodak Mobile Service for $3 a month.

This being Kodak, you can order all sizes and kinds of prints right from the site, plus photo-decorated tchotchkes like mugs, tote bags, and calendars. Paid “Premier” Gallery accounts, starting at $25 a year, give you more flexibility in what your home page looks like and discounts on prints.