Flickr

You now, Flickr has become really fantastic. They managed to create a sense of community over there, and they have tons of ways to stumble upon stuff you weren’t looking for in the first place.

I usually just start by searching some photo of Rio de Janeiro or something, but then I somehow follow a link to “Don Carlito’s stream”, from there to some (intentionally) blurry picture of a Moscow Subway, then immediately I find myself in the “Scary Huge Cities in the Nighttime pool”, and from there the path to some naked old guy Photoshop’ed to look kind’a like a bottle of Heinz Ketchup is very very short. Or is it just me?

But I digress.

It’s basically a photo sharing app, but look how galaxies-ahead it is of the (gazillion) others available.

That’s because they let you easily add comments, and have your custom picture displayed next to your name when you add a comment, and they let you “tag” images so that it immediately becomes one of a thousand others somehow related (Or not so related, but still). And they let you search pictures in so many ways (though this feature in particular can be improved). They let you group your images in “sets”. And then there are “pools” which are like “sets” but more than one person can add images to them. So now they have a really great community going on.

And for me (and you), as an outsider - it’s pretty much the best place right now on the web to find a picture of some place I’m interested in. So if you really want to stare at some photo of a paradise-like beach somewhere in Brazil for a couple of hours, you can do just that using Flickr. (Which is exactly what I do when I’m down, and all out of cocaine. And this happens quite often.)

My only criticisms are:

(1) You can only upload 20MB a month for free. A “pro” account with no limit costs 24.95$ a year. (So I opened up an account with Yahoo! Photos, who give unlimited space for free. Screw community, that’s real dough I’m talking about.)

But they seem to be doing okay, judging by the amount of “pro” members I see there.

(2) There is no “nice” way to link to some specific image from outside Flickr (like from here). You can dig in the HTML source to find the image url, but that’s not what they want you to do. They want you to view the images from Flickr itself, so they can sell ads. But the page that contains each picture is so full of other stuff that I don’t enjoy linking to that (even though that’s what I’m doing so far). I’d love to have a feature where you can get some permanent link to the image without too much stuff around it.

But aside from these two points - it’s very well done. Makes you want to grab the camera and go shoot something. With the camera that is.