The recent news of Yahoo! buying Flickr made me check it out. I was impressed enough to sign up immediately. What made me do so? Well, I liked the simple design and intuitive interface, but what really clinched it for me was this plugin which makes uploading photographs from iPhoto very easy.
It also has some other interesting features like upload by email and “blog it”, which allows you to publish any photo from Flickr directly to your blog. Unfortunately, I do not have a sample of that, as the major shortcoming of that feature as of now if that there is no simple way of combining multiple photographs into a single post. The “blog it” feature will create a new post for each photograph you decide to blog. Unless Flickr comes up with a way of publishing multiple photographs onto the same post, this feature is of limited use.
If you read carefully, you would have noticed I said there is no “simple” way of posting multiple photos in the same post. There are a couple of ways though. I remember seeing a (buy-n-use) utility somewhere on the Flickr community which claims to do the job. I haven’t used it so no idea about it’s effectiveness and unfortunately I can’t find the link either (admittedly, I haven’t tried that hard). If you need it and can’t seem to find anything yourself, let me know and I’ll try harder. The other way, of course, is to take the HTML code that Flickr generates for each of the photos when you decide to blog them (you’ll see what I mean when you get to it) and combine them in a HTML table or something. Needless to say, this involves getting your hands dirty with HTML code and is, well, rather tedious if have any more than half a dozen photographs.
If this one little grey area sorted out, and I have seen enough people complain about this so the folks at Flickr/ Yahoo must be aware of this, I can safely recommend Flickr to anyone – for whatever that’s worth. Though, admittedly, I am hardly much of a “shooter”. I did manage to take some snaps at a sporting event I was at recently using a borrowed digi cam and uploaded them for anyone to see. And yes, if you’re wondering what I am doing at a stadium with a laptop, well, I was on “official duty” as a commentator!