Flickr is a digital photo publishing and sharing website, recently acquired by Yahoo.

Flickr features some sort of social networking capabilities, letting you browse and explore shared photos by one’s friends, family or other groups of people with common interests. There is actually another way to explore Flickr, which is by using freely chosen keywords (tags) to describe and categorize your own published photos. These tags can also be used to search other peoples photos on specific topics.
One of the many beauties of Flickr is its evergrowing set of functionalities. It includes RSS feeds for user photos, tags, groups and an API that allows independent programmers to expand its services. Given this API, the possibilities are endless.

There are a couple of Flickr related sites I keep bookmarked which are worth notice:

• Flickrzen – a Flickr filter for really exceptional photographs, be that subject, technique or rarity.
• Flickr related tag browser – a Flash interface that lets photos be browsed and aggregated by their tags and related tags.
• Flickr Montager – It makes use of the Flickr API and Flash to generate mosaics from Flickr images sharing one tag.
• Spell with flickr – Takes a string, and encodes it as pictures from Flickr. Source code (PHP) available.
• Flickr Calendar – Allows you to create calendars using any image or Flickr photo location. This is just one of the many tools Flagrant Disregard provides, including this infamous Magazine Cover generator or this Movie Poster generator.
• retrievr – An experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch. It’s not 100% accurate, it works by matching the most pronounced shapes and slabs of color, and according to the author, it should be considered more as an “exploration” tool than as a “search” tool.

Upload/download tools:

• Flickr Backup – A java tool that allows you to batch download the pictures you have uploaded to Flickr back down to your computer for personal backup or restore.
• Send To Flickr Bookmarklet Javascript Code – a bookmarklet that lets you send a photo from any web page to your Flickr account, unleashed.
• FlickrFS – a virtual filesystem for GNU/Linux that lets you upload and download pictures to Flickr from the shell. You can specify multiple tags and albums for any pictures you want by making a directory underneath the mount point and copying your pictures into that directory.
• Shozu – a mobile phone application that enables sending photos from a camera-phone to Flickr (and other photo sharing sites), letting the user add descriptions and tags.

Related software:

• Slickr – a screen saver that shows images by user, group, tags. It does OpenGL fading and zooming.

My Flickr gallery can be found here but you’ll also be able to find some of my photos envolving geocaching here.