FLICKR: PRECIOUS MOMENTS ONLINE

UNEDITED SAMPLE FEATURE ARTICLE
By Jose Mari Hall Lanuza
IV-Enrico Fermi


Do you love to take pictures? Are you the one who likes to preserve a beautiful moment and then show that frozen moment of wonder to the world? Then Flickr is for you! What? You don’t know what Flickr is?

Flickr is a website that urges users to upload their photos and videos to share to the world. In short, it is a photo and video hosting website, as well as an online community. With its user-friendly interface and easy-to-use tools, it easily became a huge hit to the online community. Flickr was launched in February 2004 by Ludicorp, a Canada-based company founded in 2002. As of November 2007, it hosts more than two billion images.

Flickr and Ludicorp are now owned by Yahoo! Inc. Yahoo! acquired the company in June 2005. So you can be a Flickr member just by having a Yahoo! e-mail account, and to log in, all you have to do is open your e-mail account in Yahoo!. And the site offers a large limit of uploads per month. Paid subscribers are allowed to upload 9o-second videos and 150MB in size.

Some of the main tools used in Flickr are the Organizr, archiving, access control, and filtering. Flickr asks the users to give tags to their photos for the photos to be more accessible to other users. Giving the photo tags will make it easier for other users to see your uploaded pictures. The Organizr enables the users to modify the tags of the photos and to place them on a world map. The organizr simplifies the organization of the user’s uploaded photos.

Access control gives the user the right to modify the privacy controls of his/her uploaded images. He can choose to make it a public or private image. Making an image a private image means that it can only be viewed by the user and/or selected family members or friends. This feature gives the user more control over his uploaded photos.

Archiving also makes the accounts of the users more organized. The other users can only view the most recent 200 pictures uploaded. Other older pictures can still be viewed via URL’s. And the filtering system helps protect the credibility of the website. Each uploaded photo is filtered first before it can be viewed by other users. Flickr makes sure that the photos that can be viewed are safe and can be made public.

If you love to take pictures of beautiful things, pictures of beautiful people, or simply take pictures, and share them to people around the world, then Flickr is the site for you. Share your passion, see different views, experience a frozen moment of beauty via pictures, and meet the people who took the wonderful shots.