Fun with Flickr

Fun with Flickr 09/01/2004 08:42 PM

At the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference earlier this year I was lucky enough to get a demo of Flickr, the photo-sharing software and service from Ludicorp. (The company's president, Stewart Butterfield, is married to Caterina Fake, who did great design work here at Salon several years ago.) At the time I thought it was a neat little photo-sharing tool, but it seemed a little heavy on the Flash, which sometimes makes my head ache, and life got busy and I never got around to exploring it further. Since then Flickr has won much acclaim, and when I needed to figure out a simple way to share photos from a recent family trip, I thought I'd give it another spin last night. Turns out it has evolved beautifully since my introduction to it, and I ended up playing with it for hours, so let me now belatedly add my enthusiasm to the chorus.

It's an exquisitely well designed Web application, certainly one of the best I've ever seen, full of smart interface choices and nice little finishing touches that let you know that the developers who've built it are also heavy users of their own handiwork.

Tiny example: I noticed Flickr was dating the photos based on the date I uploaded them, so I went in to change a bunch of dates to reflect when the photos were taken. The page contained this helpful message: "The date posted is the date & time you physically published your photo on Flickr, not the date the photo was taken. We are currently storing the date that your photo was taken in the database, so rest assured you won't need to modify every photo later... There will soon be a way to sort your photos based on the date the photo was taken. Stay tuned!" So I didn't waste my time. That's what I call a considerate piece of software. And along the way you learn that Flickr is respectfully storing each photo's metadata (date, type of camera used, all that EXIF stuff that you almost never need to look at, except when you do).

It's easy to get started with Flickr, and then when you want to push it and do more with it, it leads you gently into its depths. It has a whole layer of social software -- profiles, groups, and so forth -- but since its primary function is photo sharing, that social software actually has a raison d'etre, so you don't just sit there (as with so many other ventures in this area) and wonder "Now that we're here and we know each other's hobbies and marital status, what exactly do we do?"

I am generally distrustful of using Web applications as anything more than conveniences for away-from-home access. I want my data close at hand, and most Web interfaces are still too clunky to allow for fast and complex organizing of serious quantities of stuff. But I'm seriously thinking about making Flickr my photo home base -- it's that good. And if Flickr's speedy evolution in a mere six months is any indication, the thing is going to improve -- and grow -- at an intense rate.

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