I’ve not been playing with Flickr very long now, but I’ve really come to love the service. Broken down to simplest terms, Flickr is a photo-sharing site. However, it offers a lot more features than some of the competition.

There are several ways to upload photos, but one of the most convenient methods is via email (especially for camera phone users). Once you create your Flickr account, you are given a dedicated email address. Anything you send to this address is posted to your Flickr photostream (your account space, which you can make public or private) using the subject line of the email as a photo title and they body as photo comments.

Flickr also integrates with many of the popular blogging services, such as Blogger (which I use on my sites) and Movable Type (which powers your favorite tech site, Lockergnome). Want to email a photo to both Flickr and your blog? No problem, they append “2blog” to the username part of your email address and it takes care of everything for you.

The community aspect is nice, too. Many public photos are streamed through Flickr from several users, and the tagging feature makes it easier for people to find photos. For example, if you tag a picture of your dog as “dog”, then it will appear when anyone selects the tag “dog” while browsing. The browsing feature itself is pretty cool as it lists the top tags in use and displays the names of those tags in a larger font proportional to the number of times they’re used. And if you’re willing, you can apply one of several Creative Commons licenses to your work to dictate who can and can’t download and/or use them.

And this is still a beta site! The only thing lacking so far is the ability to print photos. This may change soon, however, as a friend of mine — the same photo buff who turned me on to the site — tells me they hope to partner up with someone before long.

The main reason Flickr is able to pull all of this off is their extensive use of Open Source software. A more detailed explanation can be found in this NewsForge article. Flickr also publishes APIs for other developers, allowing a slew of software to be created to integrate with the site. For example, this Linux Gazette article explains how to get started using Perl with Flickr.

Good stuff, Maynard. If you’ve been looking for a way to share the photos jamming up your hard drive with the rest of the world, or you need a fast and easy way to display new photos on your website or in your blog, definitely consider Flickr.