Thing 16 - Flickr

Floral Composition no:1 © Melissa Donne, 2013.

With so many rival sites offering platforms to showcase creative works, it is hard to choose which one to invest your time in, and indeed new sharing sites seem to be popping up all the time (recently, another photography sharing website 500px has emerged as a significant rival to Flickr). Flickr however has been around since 2004, and remains a key site for managing and sharing personal photographs online. I haven't really used Flickr that much before, as regrettably I don't take nearly as many photos as I would like to. I have also jumped on the Instagram bandwagon (which I prefer in many ways to Flickr), or as one colleague once put it, the app that makes a £500 phone act like a £5 disposable camera. Hmmmm. Where Instagram is useful though is for snaps you take 'on the go'. Flickr on the other hand is for more serious photography, and is used by many professional photographers for the exposure it can bring (no pun intended).

I decided to create a new account as similarly to many of the other 'things' I had already signed up to Flickr. However I wanted to start with a fresh profile and try and explore it from scratch, in case I had missed out on any features the first time around. I added some photos from my Instagram to begin with, which disappointingly when uploaded are so tiny that you could do with a magnifying glass to see them properly (*update - I have since removed these and re-uploaded them directly from Instagram, thereby massively improving the image quality). I then added a few photos from my camera roll which hadn't been edited first, and once uploaded, I liked how these larger images helped my Photostream to begin to take shape. I then completed the Flickr exercise by adding 23 Things Soton as a contact, creating some sets and favouriting and commenting on some photos. I enjoyed looking at other people's photos and again like the social aspect of the site and the fact that you can favourite photos without having to subscribe to the photographer's photostream.

Edited in Instagram, then shared with Flickr.
Floral Composition no:2 © Melissa Donne, 2013

I have actually grown to quite like Flickr and have now downloaded the app on my iphone. It seems to have had a major redesign since I was last on here and it appears far more streamlined, easy to navigate and responsive. I am still using Instagram to shoot photos and apply filters, but I discovered I can share the photos I take on Instagram with Flickr. I ask myself is there much point keeping both apps running, but actually they do serve different functions. Instagram is more 'fun' and is I think for more personal, informal pics (and of course if you don't have a smartphone is utterly pointless!), whereas Flickr has quite a nice interface that lends itself well to displaying your portfolio, if you are a photographer, or indeed if you want to upload pictures of any of your creative work. I certainly intend to keep my account active, and when I get round to taking more photos with my SLR camera and not my iphone will upload these to Flickr - I'm even hoping there may be a winning photo amongst them!