Web 2.0: Flickr isn’t really that free – Who Knew?

Flickr, the online photo gallery is THE web 2.0 tool for putting your photos online. Many people use it and it seems that most pictures you find online are stored on Flickr. There are a few other online galleries such as Shutterfly and kodakgallery (that I used because I have a digital Kodak camera that interfaces with the Kodak Gallery).

And since I’ve used Kodak Gallery mostly, I have just recently started uploading some pictures to Flickr. And I just ran into a limitation of Flickr. Did you know that after you’ve uploaded more than 200 pictures, only the latest 200 pictures will show unless you upgrade to a paid Flickr account? All the pictures will be available if you upload (they don’t go away if you upload more than 200) but you can’t see them until you upgrade. It is cheap, $25/year, but 200 pictures are not many pictures so if you use Flickr much at all, you’ll need to pay for it. And clearly, most of the accounts I look at on Flickr has upgraded since they have more than 200 pictures.

I’m sure I will upgrade, but I just didn’t know that except for just trying it out, I am going to HAVE to upgrade in order to use it.

I have many, many pictures on Kodak Gallery that I want to transfer over (and that is another problem since they don’t make it easy in Kodak Gallery to bulk transfer pictures). But actually, Kodak Gallery also requires that you “pay” for it. It doesn’t have a set charge, but requires that you purchase something from them once a year. Last year we made calendars for our family for Christmas using our pictures and that took care of that requirement. Kodak Gallery is great for that, you can easily create calendars, photo mugs, note cards and all sorts of items from your pictures.

But Flickr is rapidly becoming the standard in online photo galleries and is the tool that most of the cool mashups use for their picture displays. There are all kinds of mashups that other people have created using Flickr and Sean has been experimenting with Flickr hacks from a cool book he got on how to create them. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in exploring this.

Here is a post about mashups using Flickr by Coverpop. It is one of the most amazing Flickr mashups I’ve seen. You have to check these out!

And while you are at it, check out the nice Flickr plugin for WordPress.org blogs. You can see it in my right sidebar on this blog.

Well, I guess I got off on a tangent 🙂 but the bottom line is, be aware that if you are interested in using Flickr, you will want to pay the $25 a year in order to really use it.

~Susan Mellott