Flickr
Introduction
Flickr is an online photo management and sharing site purchased by SmugMug in 2018.
This combination of online services will allow users to accomplish the list of archive tasks and some of the modify tasks we identify in the Primer. Flickr is one of those services that is easy to learn, but it also has many advanced features if you want to spend the time to move beyond the basics. Like so many of the online software as a service examples we use there is both a free and a Pro version of Flickr. The free version places limits on the number of photographs and videos you can store and also on the size of the image files it allows. The free version which allows access to the 1000 most recently uploaded images seems plenty for your experimentation and for most class projects. Should the user of a free account exceed 1000 images the oldest images will be deleted to keep the total number under 1000. Some of the examples in this section link to our Flickr account and we do pay for the Pro version ($50 per year). So, if you decide to explore this account beyond the specific examples we use (most of our images are public), just understand you are not exploring a free account.
Flickr offers a site you can use to store, organize, annotate, and print your images. While our focus here is on the active use of images, let us first recognize an oft overlooked, but critical functions of storage. Flickr will make certain your images are backed up. Most of us now keep only digital photographs. A computer, even though expensive, can be replaced. If your hard drive goes, the images stored on that machine can easily be lost and without a backup those images are gone. So, it is important to move a copy of your personal and work image collections to a second storage system. Flickr or one of the other “cloud” services we list at the conclusion of this section offer cost effective security.