In days of old, hauling out dusty photo albums was a rainy-day pastime, and viewing home movies was often a form of torture for unsuspecting guests. Thanks to Flickr, sharing photos and videos with family and friends is a modernized adventure. Flickr leaves behind the tedium of paste and paper, a key feature in this digital age when the sheer volume of photos could fill a truckload of albums. Another plus: with Flickr, viewers can log on and off at any time in the comfort of their own homes without offending the host.

Flickr has two main goals: to “help people make their content available to the people who matter to them” and “to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.” Stated simply on the company’s website, “Flickr is the WD-40 that makes it easy to get photos or video from one person to another in whatever way they want.”

Flickr was originally developed as a part of Game Neverending, a now obsolete online multiplayer game. It featured real-time photo exchange capabilities in a chat room format and focused on collecting images from the web instead of uploading users’ photos. Evolving into an “image and video hosting website,” Flickr is an easy-to-use photo and video management and sharing tool that is often used by bloggers as a photo repository.

• Flickr was founded in Canada in 2004 by two game designers
• The business was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 and moved to the US
• A basic account is free; a Pro Account with enhanced capabilities is available for $24.95/year
• As of June 2009, Flickr hosted more than 3.6 billion images

Flickr’s uploads come from camera phones and traditional cameras. The site allows users to tag photos with keywords so that they can search for a desired topic, such as a place name or photo subject. Users can post comments and mark photos as favorites, and they can also organize their photos into sets, or groups of related photos. A photo may belong to several sets, depending on the organizing preferences of the user, and these sets help direct viewers to other photos that may be of interest.

Posting photos or videos requires registration. However, unregistered users are able to search and view Flickr’s content. Once posted, materials can be made public, restricted to authorized visitors or kept private. Discover a picture or video that you’d like to put to your own use? Flickr does not become involved in relationships between its users, but its does encourage them to get in touch to discuss arrangements and permissions through the site’s FlickrMail.

Like many online tools, Flickr becomes a community and an addiction as you begin posting, viewing, discussing and tracking the activity related to your photos. The billions of photos hosted and Yahoo’s investment are indications that Flickr’s flame will burn brightly for some time to come.