Hands on: The Flickr phenomenon

Most of us are familiar with popular photo-sharing sites such as Kodak's Ofoto and Shutterfly, whether or not we make use of them.

If you have access to your own website it’s often easier to upload a web contact sheet or slideshow rather than subject yourself to the constraints imposed by many of these sites.

What makes Flickr different is that it relies heavily on user-defined tags as a means of organising, displaying and searching for images uploaded to the site. You can assign tags to your own and other people’s images.

From the point of view of the casual browser, those seeking specific themes and those who have an interest in how images are classified, Flickr provides interesting insights into how our way of accessing photographic images is changing.

You can use Flickr to carry out tag-based keyword searches in the same way as you would using photo-album software. The tags page that lists the most popular tags on the site provides an insight into current photographic preoccupations.

At the time of writing the top three tags for the week were ‘buncefield’ ‘hemelhempstead’ and ‘oildepot’. All-time most popular tags, including ‘amsterdam’, ‘clouds’ and ‘snow’, are more inscrutable.

A recent introduction, clustering, provides links to pages of images with the specified tag and other, related tags. For example, London clusters include ‘england, uk, bigben’, ‘thames, bridge, river’, and ‘tube, underground, train’.

Clusters can contain a dozen or more tags in decreasing order of relevance and each is a link to pages of images containing that tag. You can click on individual tags within a cluster to view, say, pictures of the Thames (11,151 in total), or view only those images that contain all the tags in the cluster.

As part of Yahoo, it’s no surprise that a great deal of what happens on Flickr is group-based. Like all Yahoo groups, these consist of thread-based discussions plus, of course, lots of photos.

Some of the more popular include Flickrcentral (181,626 images), B&W (133,932), Flowers (70,861) and Bloggers (31,756). Its support for RSS and Atom feeds makes Flickr a popular image repository for bloggers.

Like other online photo services, Flickr allows you to restrict access to photos to selected groups. You can, for example, upload photos to an area that only friends or family can access.