'Flickr' is in an online photo class by itself

This week's review will include a larger than usual number of "and's," "also's," and "in-addition's," because this week's website pursues a single goal with an exceptionally thorough approach. While online photo sharing applications are commonplace on the web, and while Flickr, like the rest, will allow you to store a collection of photos onsite and link those images to offsite weblogs, it also does so much more that we might as well just designate a new category for this specific service. After all, the easiest way to be in a class by yourself is to invent the class.

Created by Ludicorp, an online research and development company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Flickr claims to be ("almost certainly") the best online photo sharing and organization application in the world, and it would be a difficult claim to dispute even without the qualification. While still in beta, the service has been getting the kind of raves that most software developers can only dream of (have a look at the Accolades page), and the knowledge that the final version is still under construction has one wondering what other features they can possibly add. For a complete description of Flickr's current capabilities, you'll have to drop by the site, but in the meantime we can cover most of the highlights available to members, as well as some functions of interest to casual browsers.

For those who choose to subscribe to the service and post their images online, Flickr offers free personal webpages with a 10 MB per month upload limit and a restricted feature set. (More features, more bandwidth, and a promise of ad-free browsing are some of the perks available for an annual fee.) The keystone of each subscriber's webpage is the "Photostream," which is simply a chronological collection of the most recently uploaded images running down the center of the page.

If desired, Flickr can display a collection of albums -or Photosets- organized by whatever criteria the author desires. ("Mary's Wedding," "Super Bowl," "Manhole Covers of Madison County," etc.) on the left side of the page. To the right are links to a personal Profile, a Calendar (showing on which days new images have been added), an album of Favorites collected from other members' pages, and an Archive.

There is also a keyword search window (because, like any self-respecting photo organization software, Flickr allows members to add cataloging Tag words to the images they store), and a link to your most common Tags. Thanks to Tags, if someone visits your Flickr home page specifically to see the photos of that new kid you've been going on and on about, but doesn't care about the dog wearing the Santa hat, they can simply choose the appropriate keyword(s) and go straight to the shots in question. (The Tag browser is itself a rather nice piece of design - arranging your most common labels alphabetically, but increasing font size in accordance with how many images are included in that particular set.)

And there's more. Individual images can accept visitor comments (like standard blog sites) as well as hold their own caption information in popup boxes - which provide a few extra details for the interested viewer - but don't interfere with the progress of the casual visitor.

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