You CAN put all your eggs in one basket. Want to place your images online but keep them private, just share them with a select group of contacts, or create an online image archive? You can do any or all of these things with a photo sharing platform like Flickr.com.
A web 2.0 application, Flickr can be called social networking with photography. But there are more uses for it than sharing your flower photos. Flickr’s not designed for commercial use, and you might not want to put your original artwork there, but there are still plenty of ways you can use it to show images of what you do.
We set up a Flickr account for historical photos and illustrations associated with the Rochester Labor History map project. And one for Artist Marilyn Anderson, who wanted a way to share and store images from her gallery openings. Setting up multiple Flickr accounts is possible, but it’s easy to organize images from a single account into sets and collections by subject, project, event or work area.
Not limited to photography, scanned images of illustrations, plans or diagrams can all go on Flickr. Just design your original file for the end use. If you want the images to be viewed online only, then scanning at 72 ppi (pixels per inch) is fine. If you want to be able to print them, scan files at 150 ppi and output the original size on an inkjet printer.
On Flickr you have the ability to set the copyright for your work to All Rights Reserved, or set a Creative Commons License to restricted use, limited use or unlimited use. See www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ for the details on how this works.
You can have access to unlimited image uploads and storage with an inexpensive Pro account. Then forget any worries about losing your images when a hard drive fails or a disk is lost.
Do you have ideas for how Flickr might be useful to you? Want help setting up an account, or scanning and uploading images? Contact me for a consultation on using Flickr.
