6,000,000,000 pictures now on Flickr
Posted by Celia Walter | 6 Aug, 2011The Flickr Blog has announced that it now has uploaded its 6 billionth photograph. This is an impressive figure, although Facebook do this every couple of months. However, there's very little comparison between the two, as Facebook images are generally designed to be shared with small sets of contacts, and Flickr images are for a much wider audience.
I use Flickr all of the time, both to upload my own photographs (one of which you can see in this post), but also for almost anything that I need images for - particularly presentations. The Flickr advanced search option allows me to search for Creative Commons images which I can freely use with attribution. Because of the tagging element to Flickr it's really easy to find excellent images that not only portray concepts such as libraries, but it's also an excellent way to find images that indicate feelings and emotions.
There are several search engines that use Flickr to return images, such as the always delightful Tag Galaxy which is beautiful and a new one to me which I found today, Hive. It says of itself "Flickr Hive Mind is a data mining tool for the Flickr photography database, allowing search by: tags(keywords); Flickr photography groups; Flickr users, their contacts, and favorites; free text; the Flickr Explore algorithm for interestingness. Flickr Hive Mind can also be an effective tool to identify photography with licenses that allow non-commercial (and sometimes) commercial use." Certainly worth a look.