A FLICKR OF RECOGNITION

Picture this: you are all at the eleventy-first birthday party of your great-great-aunty Muriel with all the photo albums spread out across the table and you are looking for a picture of the birthday girl as the back end of a pantomime cow. Everyone's crowding around the coffee table as a dedicated team of well-wishers scour all 23 of Muriel's photo albums for this one photo. If only there was a quicker way...


Flickr is the answer. Flickr is the photo sharing service that means that all your photos are in one place (or rather not with the rise of cloud computing). Better still, these photos are searchable. This is because you can tag photos - put little signposts on them that give keywords relating to the topic of the photo. That means that - joy of joys! - you can now access that priceless Muriel memory by simply searching "Muriel the cow's arse". Sorry. Inappropriate joke. I hang my head in shame.

But smutty remarks about one's great-great-aunt aren't the point. The point is that Flickr is a photo revolution. It is simpler and cheaper than putting photos on a CD, and sending a link to someone by email is quicker than emailing a bloated JPEG image. Here's a link to the girl who first thought of Flickr while working at a games company and realised she needed to share her photos with a co-worker. That's another clever thing about Flickr: sending links is viral advertising that encourages people around Flickr uses to use the service as well. It started in 2004 and by June 2006 had 177 million photos. That's 17 photos uploaded every 10 seconds. November 2007? 2 billion images. Wow.

By now Flickr is up there with Facebook for being seriously good at what it does. There is now a Flickr smartphone app, which might sound daft, but let me put it into perspective: you take a photo on your phone then upload it to Flickr. Your smartphone automatically "geotags" the photo you upload through the phone's GPS. When you look through your photos on Flickr, you get a map telling you exactly where in the world you took each one of your photos. That's quite impressive.

Flickr have even managed to deflate the tricky issue of copyright through "Creative Commons". This gives users a variety of options for how their photos are used by those who find them on internet searches or otherwise. You can say people can use your photos for non-commercial use, use it and credit it, or your photo but not "derivative work" based on it. The point is that it is a total revolution of the copyright idea; Creative Commons and media-sharing websites like Flickr and Youtube are not making you pay for a privilege that ten years ago would have been a sticky topic. In fact the photo of the cow above is from Flickr. It's hard to express it, but Flickr is a new way of looking at media sharing. Sounds lame, but it really is big news (see an article from The Observer here). Muriel would be proud.