Why I'm moving my pictures over to Flickr

As part of the picture scanning project I'm working on, I've spent some time in the past few weeks looking at the various tools available on the web for storing and sharing pictures. Most of you are familiar with OFoto... that's where many of us upload and share pictures. OFoto works pretty good, but it has a few drawbacks that I don't like:

- I can't download pictures to use on my computer. Perhaps I
want to print one of Kevin's picture or use it in a card or
document, I can't do that
- I can't link to my OFoto pictures from somewhere else. In
order to see my pictures you need to log in, there is no other
interface for getting access to the image (what computer guys call
an API...)
- Because of the issues listed above, I am stuck viewing pictures
in that limited OFoto interface (and the pictures are too small to
really enjoy)

There is a photo sharing site called flickr.com that has become really popular, particularly because they fix exactly the problems called out above. I've been playing around with what it can do and I wanted to share it with you.

- First, take a look at my flickr site (http://flickr.com/photos/steveandsue/)

- Then click on any picture (here's one to try http://flickr.com/photos/steveandsue/394335199/)

- Then look at the largest view of that picture: (http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=394335199&size=l)

That rocks... I can also link to any of the size images directly from an email or blog and they let you download the large size right from that last page.

That's pretty cool, but the best part of Flickr is the API that they have developed. Because they are so open with sharing pictures, hundreds of programs are available to link in and use the pictures... If you go to my blog (http://stedanrac.blogspot.com/) you can see one example called a "badge" that rotates through the pictures.

But that isn't the coolest thing... If you do one tech thing this week, download and install this screensaver (note to Rachel... there is a Mac version there also). When you get it installed, you can point it to a set of flickr pictures. Posted below here is a detailed instruction page to help. Believe me, it is really cool and worth installing...