What is flickr?

January 31st, 2009

by Amy Stevens Adams

flickr is a free image hosting website. It is a great way for people to upload and share albums of digital photos with their family and friends, like a virtual scrapbook. From a business standpoint, it can be a powerful tool. John and I use flickr as an informal, online portfolio of our past logo and website designs. The reason we find flickr so handy, is that we can store all our images in one folder on the web, and refer visitors there, instead of taking up space and speed on our blog.

Setting up an account is easy, and if you have an existing Yahoo account, it’s even easier! For CCB, I had to set up a CapeCodBranding Yahoo account (always a good idea to keep business and personal email accounts separate), then I was on my way to creating our flickr Profile and “Portfolio”, as I call it.

Here’s how to setup a flickr portfolio;

1. Go to flickr.com

2. Click on “Create Your Account”

flikrcreate

3. You will be redirected to a page that asks for you to sign in with your Yahoo email, or open a Yahoo account

flickrsignup
flickr will walk you through the setup process (very simple), and you’re in!

Next, write some cool stuff about your business in your Profile, and upload your images.

flikrupload

flikrportfolio flickr does a great job of walking you through the steps. Once you’ve got all your images uploaded into your ‘Photostream’, it’s time to start promoting your work. On WordPress, we use a widget called WP flickr by Blogates.com. It allows us to set how many square images we want to feature (we use 6), and we like it because it has a very simple, streamlined look.

Using flikr as an informal scrapbook of your work is very handy. While for us it doesn’t replace the portfolio of our best designs that we feature on our website, flickr does allow us to ‘put it all out there’ (even the designs that our clients didn’t like!). After all, it’s our work, and we want to share it all. flikrphotostream

It’s the difference between the elegant wedding album that gets stored away in the closet so it doesn’t get damaged, and the loose stack of candid wedding snapshots that you pull out of the end table drawer and laugh at with friends. It’s fun and easy. Everyone loves to share their work and pictures.

If you’re a business, you need to get your work out there for people to see. It doesn’t matter if you’re a big company, like Apple, posting pictures of your crew working on designs for the latest MacBook, or if you’re a small one-person boutique designing handbags in your living room. Share your work with the world!

flickr can be a powerful business tool.

-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding