Photos: Sharing

Flickr CC: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Originally uploaded by prakope

You might already have a Myspace, Facebook, or Friendster profile, and you may have even posted photos on your profile albums to share with friends. Social networking sites like these offer practically an unlimited amount of space to upload your photos and sort them into albums. If, however, you enjoy taking pictures more than the average person, you might find photo-sharing sites have much more to offer.

There are plenty of photo sharing sites to choose from on the Internet, but Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket are just a few of the bigger names in the business. And while they offer the uploading and sorting options that you’re familiar with, they take it further for the digital neat-freaks among us with the option to arrange pics into detailed albums, sets and collections.

In case you aren’t already familiar, the basic business of “photo sharing” is done through something known as “tagging,” in which you attach as many keywords as you want to describe a photo. Though Facebook and Myspace have a similar feature in which you “tag” photos with friends’ names, photo sharing sites allow you to tag not only with names but with just about any other words or phrases that might have anything at all to do with your photo. This way, you can see all of the pictures other members have taken of “motorcycles,” “cheese sandwiches,” or “squids,” and others can see yours as well. Click here to see more examples of tagging on Flickr.

Flickr CC: grilled cheese sandwiches Originally uploaded by nettsu

So what else do photo sharing sites have to offer? Is tagging the only benefit? Besides tagging, sites like the ones already mentioned also allow you to upload video, create slide shows, or setup links to your blog or other personal profiles, just to name a few. You may also enjoy learning that others have created different fun and interesting uses for these sites known as “mashups.”

Discovery Exercise

1. Create a free account on one of the photo-sharing sites mentioned above.
2. Upload some of your favorite photos. Create as many unique tags for each photo as you want. Try organizing them into sets and collections.
3. After you’ve uploaded and tagged some photos, click on the tags with your own photo to see what others have posted with the same tags.
4. Take a look at some of the Flickr mashups to try out other fun options.