The Basics of Utilizing a Flickr Account

With this short presentation, I hope to illustrate and highlight the features of Flickr that can benefit the School of Communication.

Creating a Flickr account is free and easy, all you need is a Yahoo! ID

The user homepage helps users keep track of any recent activity, such as comments, messages, and favorites. This can help the Flickr webmaster reply to any comments or messages promptly.

Photos are easy to upload, tag, and describe thanks to Flickr’s flash uploading tool. Flickr also supports mobile uploads, which could be useful if photos from a special SOC event want to shared in real time on Flickr.

Flickr Organizr allows batch editing of photos and it’s the tool that helps keep photos organized into sets and collections.

The design of a Flickr homepage is clean, simple and user friendly. Brief photo statistics can be found under each individual photo and viewers are provided with excerpts of photo descriptions.

Photos can be organized easily into sets and collections, making them easy to find. Collections are only available to Pro accounts.

This is a tag cloud automatically generated by Flickr to show the most popular tags used to describe photos.

Individual photo pages can feature lengthy descriptions and notes, both of which support HTML formatting. A menu with various methods of sharing photos is located just under the photo title.

Tags appear on each photo page, leaving Flickr users the option of adding extra tags. If a photo is included in any Group pool, the name of the pool will appear on the photo page. Flickr also publicly provides extra information about individual photos, such as date taken, camera used, and view counts.

Under the “popular” tab in the main menu, one can find information about the most popular photos according to views, comments, and favorites. This data is useful in determining the content most interesting to viewers.

A Flickr profile is the best place for users to share any biographical information about themselves. For our intents and purposes, the profile section would be great in promoting Loyola and the School of Communication with links and contact information. The profile also shows any groups an individual belongs to as well as contacts.

A Flickr group homepage also has an easy, user friendly interface. The option to join is found just above the main group pool. Every group can have a brief description about the type of content allowed and a discussion forum.

A paid Pro Flickr account would benefit the School of Communication not only for the amount of content it would be able to hold, but the statistical information Flickr could provide. As you can see, Flickr aggregates daily and total views, comments, and favorites, as well as cataloguing referring links and popular search terms. This information would help the School of Communication learn where viewers are coming from.

To see an active example of the School of Communication’s Flickr account, visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/44276382@N03/

For an example of the School of Communication’s Flickr group, visit

http://www.flickr.com/groups/1231067@N25/