Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo!. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.^]Yahoo has reported that Flickr has a total of 51 million registered member and 80 million unique visitors. In August 2011, it reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images. For mobile users, Flickr has an official app for iPhone and for Windows Phone 7, but not for other mobile devices.

On Flickr, you can choose to make your photos either public or private (but more than 80 percent of the 5.5 million photos are public.) You can annotate your pictures, adding captions within the frame, or post comments below other users? photos. Most significantly, you can append "tags," adjectives that describe the photo?s category (such as "dog," "poodle," "cute"). Then all of the photos that share a particular tag can themselves be explored as a group, which online pundits call a "folksonomy."

The result is something that approaches a vast theater of collective performance art. Various groups on Flickr are devoted to photo collections of confusing street signs, mannequins and Halloween costumes. There's a group devoted to pictures of dogs, naturally, but there's also a group devoted to pictures of dogs' noses. One popular thread includes photos of circular objects framed within squares. Fake says that the best part of the service is finding like-minded shutterbugs and getting recognition for your art. "There's a real magic to getting reactions to the work you've done," she says. (11 March 2005).