Everyone needs a place to host and showcase photos. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with Flickr. Owned by Yahoo, Flickr offers a free and paid service for hosting and sharing of photos and videos. The free service offers 100MB of monthly photo uploads, 2 video uploads (90 second and 500MB max), and unlimited storage. For $25 a year, an upgrade to a Pro account will get you an unlimited photo and video upload bandwidth, profile options (limit viewable sizes, change profile layout, etc), statistics to track visits and posts to your photos, and an ad free platform. Flickr has one of the largest, if not the largest group community, featuring tens of thousands of groups for everything from camera brands to various types of car photos. Various group are dedicated to critique and help with photos, even acceptance into Getty. Flickr can also be useful for those who just need standard photo hosting, as it allows photos to be linked in an external forum or website.

While Flickr is a great service for students, beginners, and those on a budget, it isn’t perfect. A lack of ability to customize your profile, no sales ability, and strict rules and conditions make Flickr less then optimal for someone looking to get seriously into makes it marking their work. To take it to the next level, you may want to look into Smugmug or similar service.

If you’re interested, take a look at my profile (http://flickr.com/camhabib). Signup takes literally no time if you already have a Yahoo account and only a few seconds if you don’t. Try it out and see how you like it.