Hands on: The Flickr phenomenon

All uploaded photos inherit the default privacy level set on your account page, initially set up so all photos can be viewed by the public who can comment on them. This can be changed easily, as can the setting for individual photo sets.

Limiting access requires a degree of organisation – setting up contacts and arranging them into groups. People can belong to one of two groups – ‘friends’ and ‘family’ – or to both.

One positive aspect of Flickr is the number of people prepared to comment on submissions. If you’re an aspiring photographer who wants honest criticism, this can be very useful, but be prepared for people to be blunt.

If the level of criticism gets beyond what you’d consider constructive and friendly you can block interaction with the individual concerned and even change the access settings to make images private, but this will break any external links to them.

You can sign up for a Flickr account for free; if you have a Yahoo account, simply register a Flickr username. The account lets you upload up to 20MB of images a month, but only the 200 most recent are displayed; older images are archived, so if you’ve blogged an image the link will not break.

For $24.95 (approx £14.35) a year you can upgrade to a Pro account, which raises the upload limit to 2GB per month and provides unlimited storage and permanent archiving of original images (free account images are recompressed and downsampled to a 75 x 75pixel thumbnail and four other sizes, measuring 120, 240, 500 and 1,024pixels on the longest edge).

Given the bandwidth limit on the free account it makes sense to downsample your photos to 1,024pixels on the longest edge prior to uploading, as this is the maximum size they’ll be used.

Another thing that differentiates Flickr from many online photo-sharing sites is that it offers a variety of applications and utilities which not only enrich the viewing experience, but also make the job of uploading and organising images much easier.

The most ubiquitous of these is Slideshow, a simple but well-designed app that can be run in its own window, has a pop-up browser, can be played forwards or in reverse and has an adjustable delay timer. Then there’s the Organizr, which arranges your photos in date order in a calendar format in much the same way as album software such as Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.

The Flickr API (application programming interface) is available for use by third-party developers, and this has led to a raft of utilities and viewer applets, each of which provides either a more convenient way of uploading and organising photos or a unique viewing perspective.

Mappr, by Stamen Design, is a search engine that maps photos to their geographic location. The current beta is US only, but there are plans to expand it to include Europe, Asia and the rest of the world. In the meantime, if you’re interested in other parts of the world, there’s Flickrmap, for which the developer charges a $5 (approx £2.90) annual subscription.