Flickr Hacks: Tips & Tools for Sharing Photos Online

'Flickr Hacks: Tips & Tools for Sharing Photos Online' by Paul Bausch is a great guide for anyone that likes to share photos online and uses or plans to use the incredible web app Flickr. 50 Hacks/Tips await you in this book, and I'll highlight some of my favorite hacks here: 07. Feed Your Latest Photos to Your Web Site 08. Make a Photo Gallery in 30 Seconds or Less 11. Play with Tags 23. View Flickr Photos on TiVo 33. Download a List of Photos 42. Build a Custom Upload Script 44. Find the Dominant Color of an Image 50. Make a Slideshow If you enjoy working with photos and want to get more out of your experience, start using Flickr and learning from this guide... FUN awaits you!! ***** RECOMMENDED

Flickr is not just a photo sharing site. It's a community, a toolset and maybe it's a way of life. You can post images from Flickr to your blog or other web site. You can upload images via e-mail or direct from your mobile phone. You can swap, share, geo-tag (add location data) and creative commons copyright your photos, screen shots and digital artwork. Think of Flickr as your personal image management centre. This book provides an "open sesame" to this Aladdin's cave.. in one 'easy to read' volume. It delivers both an overview of the vast range of Flickr uses as well as detailed recipes, including code, on 'how to'. The code samplets might just deter some less technical book shop browsers from buying. That's a shame, as even those with no intention of ever writing any Perl or PHP or otherwise accessing the Flickr API will find more than enough to interest them. This single volume overview helps 'fast track' your Flickrability, giving you a short cut down the learning curve. That's what "hacks", and the whole wonderful O'Reilly Hacks series, are all about. The exposition of the variety of these Flickr apps actually inspires you to think outside the frame and conjure up your own Flickr apps. It's got me using my camera phone shopping and in household and automobile maintenance. See another great O'Reilly book in your local book shop but want to compare prices with another store? Click the book's image and check later. We needed oven repairs but couldn't tell the model, so click and Flickr, forward the URL to the supplier's tech department for advice. There's a crack in the retaining wall. Click it, date it, check back later to see if it's getting worse. Not all these uses are flickr apps, of course, but they show you how the 'new' technologies of cameras, camera phones, and the web work together. And Flickr has emerged as a key part of the story. They are delivering new "synergies" for everyday life. I've been thinking of using my camera phone and Flickr to create a web based inventory for my book, CD and DVD library. Click and flickr avoids lots of typing. Sounds good to me. Why not a Flickr based 'business card' database? It would be shareable and accessible, for both upload and view, from multiple platforms. And you can control user access fairly easily. And the relatively small size of camera phone images is an advantage. It makes uploads easier. The Flickr hacks book doesn't tell you how to do these two specifically, but it does provide the tool kit. "Flickr Hacks" gives us a few hints at the life story of Flickr itself. It tells us how Flickr began life as multi-user on-line game. It would be great to get more background of this kind. I suppose that will have to wait for another book. Hopefully we'll see "the Flickr Story" one of these days.

Flickr is one of those web sites that has gone in directions I don't think anyone ever imagined it would go. What started out as simple photo-sharing is now a full-featured site with a programming API. Many of these are covered and explored in the book Flickr Hacks - Tips & Tools for Sharing Photos Online by Paul Bausch & Jim Bumgardner. Contents: Sharing Photos; Tagging Photos; Viewing Photos; Community; Maintenance; API Basics; Custom Applications; Index At the core, Flickr is a site to share pictures online with friends, family, or anyone else you open your pictures to. And pretty much, that's all I've used it for. I don't take a lot of pictures, but the ones I have taken that relate to shared experiences (like Lotusphere) have made it up there. In fact, someone sponsored me for a professional Flickr account (thank you!), but it's about ready to expire. I wasn't planning on renewing it at that level, but I may have to reconsider after reading this book. The book is about the size of a normal Hacks title, but there's only 50 hacks in here. As you can imagine, each one goes into much more detail than normal. And there *is* some fun stuff in here. If you have a little background in PHP or Perl, you can really get crazy, too. For instance, I didn't know you could email photos to your Flickr account. Hack #6 shows how that works, and it explains how Flickr can often serve as a real-time look into breaking events such as the London train bombing. People were using their cell phones to take pictures and then mailing them in to the Flickr account. Or for fun stuff, you can use the Flickr API to build routines to create "ransom note" messages (a different picture for each letter, "glued" together into sentences) in hack #47. Hack #48 shows you how to take one of your photos and create a "slider puzzle" out of it. And in between those two ranges you'll find a number of things that will cause you, like they did me, to say "Flickr can do that?"... If you use Flickr and actively load photos out there, this will be a "must read" book to enhance and expand your Flickr experience. Even if you're just a casual user like me, you'll have your eyes opened to some new possibilities. Now where was that Flickr renewal email?