Volumes could be - and have been - written about the problems of moving images around the Internet, especially multiple large images and especially if you are not a professional photographer who has set up a Web site with a secure gallery.
Because many of our clients are associations or businesses whose members and employees send us photos of all sorts of events, we face the problem every day. Photos snapped with camera phones, or digital cameras set to record small, e-mail friendly images don't translate well to print.
[After the jump, read more about using Flickr as a production process tool.]
In the past we have asked people with a lot of large photos to burn them to a disc and snail-mail them. Reliable, but slow and time-consuming for all concerned. Especially at the 11th hour of a deadline cycle.
About a year ago, I realized that the photo-sharing site Flickr.com provides an excellent solution. With a free account, you can quickly upload and organize photos that can be shared with the world or just a small circle of friends. You can upload pix via the Flickr Uploadr (available for both PC and Mac), which is how I usually do it; iPhoto, Aperture or Windows XP plugins; through the Flickr; with email or with third-party desktop programs.
I stumbled onto the solution in the course of some freelance writing I do about big rig trucks. I shoot a lot of photos of trucks, and had to either email my favorites and hope the editors liked them or burn a CD - not a great solution on deadline. I was in the middle of posting some personal photos to share with friends when, like Homer Simpson, I slapped my forehead and said "D'OH!" What works for friends will work for professionals, too.
The neat things about Flickr is that photos upload fast, especially with the Uploader app; you can describe and add tags to photos, as well as arrange them in any order or sets you want to; and the person on the other end can download a large-file size.
My editors loved it - they had cutlines and ID information already in hand, and several could look at the images at the same time to select. It wasn't long before I found new ways to use Flickr.
One of our clients likes to preview photos of members before approving them for use in their publication. Five or 10 minutes of culling, sorting and uploading gave him a set of photos that he breezed through to make his choices - before having to revise them in a layout.
My colleague Summer Huggins is far more experienced in using Flickr on your Web site, so I'll let her describe that. Also, according to Rex and Patrick R., we use Flickr for lots of things here on Hammock.com by tying it into our account there. They describe those features in a previous post on this blog.