There are other photo sharing services on the internet but Flickr is special because of the way it organises and displays pictures and also the way that it links common interest groups which might be families, friends or just people taking pictures with a common theme.

A month ago an email landed in dpexpert's inbox from John Koontz in California, inviting us to join in the “30 day photo challenge”. The idea was for every participant to take one photo a day for a month and to post each day’s picture to a Flickr group called “30daychallenge”. This way all the pictures were kept together in a common gallery and the participants could keep an eye on each others’ daily posts.

Using Flickr is free -- the service is now owned by Yahoo. Yahoo have their own photo sharing service but it is feeble compared with Flickr, which is no doubt why they acquired the company. Joining up is simple but there is usually a wait of a few days before an application is approved and photo uploading can start. Flickr proclaims itself to be in beta form but this does not mean that it is defective or bug-ridden. It wouldn’t be surprising if it is always in beta mode because the creators seem to be constantly adding new features.

When a photo is uploaded to Flickr it can be tagged with an agreed handle -- in our case “30daychallenge” -- and assigned to a Group. It can also be sent to a personal “Set” which creates a hyper linked thumbnail grid of all the pictures in that set. When a thumbnail is clicked the image opens in Flickr’s default size of about 500 pixels wide and from there it can be launched at a larger size.

There is an Organize view of sets and groups that makes changing tags, grouping and captions a breeze. In fact the big attraction of Flickr is that it is clever and useful but astonishingly easy to use.

Common interest groups are taking to Flickr like the proverbial duck to water. There is a Melbourne flickrnauts group that not only meets on the internet but also gets together in the flesh from time to time.

Like all really useful internet and computer services Flickr has spawned add-ons. Flickrtoys is a set of applets that make collages, calendars, frames, movie posters and so on from images on Flickr.

At its most basic Flickr is the place to put the pictures of a holiday, the grand children or a family get together and then email pals to let them know the URL for the picture set. Flickr even makes that easy with a form email to let contacts know that the pictures are posted. Just fill in the email addresses and press the button and bingo! Contacts have been created and they go straight to the pictures they have been invited to look at and they can be viewed one at a time or as an uncluttered slideshow. The clean interface is another admirable Flickr attribute.

The uploaded pictures can be marked as either public or private and access to them can be restricted. At its most challenging and entertaining Flickr is a way of making cyber friends and communities in common enterprises. Mind you, when you visit the Flickr site you might ask yourself: Is it possible to have too many photographs of nothing in particular? Perhaps when the profligacy of novelty has passed we will be better at sorting our pictures and throwing away the duds.

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