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Flickr

Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite.

In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its innovative community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means.

History

Flickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, Canada-based company founded in 2002. Ludicorp launched Flickr in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.

Early incarnations of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room called FlickrLive for sharing photos; the successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. It has since been removed due to a security breach that arose in which users could delete other people's photos without their permission.

In March 2005, Yahoo! Inc. acquired Ludicorp and Flickr. During the week of June 28 all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, resulting in all data being subject to United States federal law. ^[1].

Features

Organization

A screenshot of hot tags on Flickr.

Flickr allows photo submitters to categorize their images by use of keyword "tags" (a form of metadata), which allow searchers to easily find images concerning a certain topic such as place name or subject matter. Flickr provides rapid access to images tagged with the most popular keywords. Because of its support for user-generated tags, Flickr repeatedly has been cited as a prime example of effective use of folksonomy. Also, Flickr was one of the first websites to implement tag clouds.

Flickr also allows users to categorize their photos into "sets", or groups of photos that fall under the same heading. However, sets are more flexible than the traditional folder-based method of organizing files, as one photo can belong to many sets, or one set, or none at all (the concept is directly analogous to the more well-known "labels" in Google's Gmail). Flickr's "sets", then, represent a form of categorical metadata rather than a physical hierarchy.

Organizr

Organizr is a non-essential, non-HTML component used, as the name suggests, to organize photos. It allows users to perform most of the photo-modification tasks available through Flickr's web interface, including modifying tags, descriptions, and set groupings, but uses Macromedia Flash to more closely emulate the look, feel, and quick functionality of desktop-based photo-management applications. Because of this, Organizr also greatly simplifies the batch modification of groups of photos, which is more cumbersome with the web interface.

Access control

Flickr provides both private and public image storage. A user uploading an image can set privacy controls that determine who can view the image. A photo can be flagged as either public or private. Private are visible by default only to the uploader, but they can also be marked as viewable by friends and/or family. Privacy settings also can be decided by adding photographs from a user's photostream to a "group pool". If a group is private then all the members of that group can see the photo. If a group is public then the photo becomes public as well. Flickr also provides a "contact list" which can be used to control image access for a specific set of users in a way similar to that of LiveJournal.

Many of its users allow their photos to be viewed by anyone, forming a large collaborative database of categorized photos. By default, other users can leave comments about any image they have permission to view, and in some cases can add to the list of tags associated with an image.

Interaction and compatibility

Flickr's functionality includes RSS and Atom feeds and an API that allows independent programmers to expand its services.

The core functionality of the site relies on standard HTML and HTTP features, allowing for wide compatibility among platforms and browsers. The text-editing and tagging interface uses AJAX, with which most modern browsers are compliant. Organizr relies on the widely accessible Macromedia Flash technology to provide an alternative interface for organizing photos.

Images also can be posted to the user's collection via an email interface.

As of March 24, 2006, the site is still operating in a beta stage, but increasingly it has been adopted by many web users, especially members of the weblog community. In addition, Flickr is popular with Macintosh users, who are often locked out of photo-sharing sites because they require the PC/Windows architecture to work.

Licensing

Flickr offers users the ability to release their images under certain common usage licenses. The licensing options primarily include the Creative Commons attribution-based and minor content-control licenses. As with "tags", the site allows easy searching of only those images that fall under a specific license.

Software Architecture

Cal Henderson revealed much of Flickr's backend in a 2005 PowerPoint presentation at the Vancouver PHP Association. The platform consists of

• PHP for core application logic
• Smarty Template Engine
• PEAR for XML & Email
• Perl for "controlling"
• ImageMagick for image processing
• MySQL 4.0
• Java for the node service
• Apache Web Server 2

Since Flickr's aquisition by Yahoo! and the transering of their data to Yahoo!'s datacenters, they have stopped using ImageMagick [2].

Notes and references

1. ↑  An active discussion about privacy laws, access-by-country, The Patriot Act and Code 2257 can be found here
2. Flickr of idea on a gaming project led to photo website, USA Today, 2/27/2006

External links

• Flickr
• FlickrBlog
• Ludicorp corporate website

Third-party tools

• GROU.PS, a free groupware tool for many web service providers, including Flickr too
• Mobup, an open-source application to manage uploads from Java enabled cameraphones.
• FlickrS60, an open-source application to manage uploads from PythonS60.
• Retrievr, an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch or uploading an image.
• Spell with Flickr - spells out words using letters in Flickr photos.
• fd's Flickr Toys - online Flickr tools and games.
• Flickr Montager - Create realtime photo mosaics using images from Flickr.
• Flickr Related Tag Browser
• Slickr - a ticker that pulls images from Flickr and scrolls them along the side of your desktop.
• Flickr Color Picker A Flickr Based Color picker
• Flickr Posters Posters made of images in flickr - Very Impressive and surreal
• The Most Interesting Pictures By... View other users most intersting images.
• Mappr! Where It's At Places flickr photos on a US map

Flickr games

• fastr - ten flickr photos are shown in succession. the faster you guess the common tag, the more points you get
• matchr - a set of flickr photos are shown. find the pairs of photos with common tags in the least amount of time and with the fewest guesses
• Flickrball - a flickr version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. starting with one tag and a set of images, find another tag in one of the images that will get you closer to the end tag
• memry - the classic memory game, flickr-style. pick a tag to get 8 photos, then uncover two at a time to find two instances of the same photo
• flickr sudoku - a Sudoku game, but with flickr images. given 9 images, make sure that rows, columns, and 3x3 grids have one of each image

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This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.