Flickr is an image and video hosting website as well as an online community platform. It was one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications. In addition to being a popular website for people to share personal photographs, the service is widely used as a photo repository. As of November 2008, it claims to host more than 3 billion images.
Creating an account on Flickr is free. If you need to upload a large number of photos, you can pay for a Professional account for about 25 USD per year.

How do I start to Flickr?
Go to the www.flickr.com website and create a new account for free (you can upgrade later to a pro account if you wish). Flickr is owned by Yahoo!, so if you already have a Yahoo! account, you don’t have to create a new one.
As soon as you’re done creating your account or logging in, you’ll be invited to upload photos onto the Flickr website, which you can do on the site directly or with Flickr Uploader which makes it much easier and faster.
You’ll need to name and describe the photos you upload, but also offer Tags (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)) which will make them even easier to find on the web.
The community part of Flickr resides in Groups and Friends which facilitate networking with other Flickr photo albums, along with a variety of features such as blogs and the possibility to add photos to a world map, thus documenting the planet through images.
Also, there’s a possibility of commenting on people’s photos, which may engage dialogue, and does integrate interactivity.

If you do have a Flickr account, join the UNI group! http://www.flickr.com/groups/uniglobalunion/

Let UNI know you now have a Flickr account by going to the “Friends” area when you are logged in (http://flickr.com/photos/friends) so we can befriend and share our photo galleries online.

What’s in Flickr for unions?
Flickr is yet another way unions can use social networking to spread the word (the image in this case) on their causes. It’s an alternative to union news: in a few images, the labour movement can portray its daily activities.
This kind of union presence on one of the fastest-growing, most popular, data-sharing websites, will improve union visibility to the outside world but also to members who already have Flickr accounts. Many members already take union-related photos – why not offer them a space to publish them online in one common place?
This can serve as an image archive for union organizations as well as a source of illustrations for websites and magazines, media publications.

How does UNI use Flickr?
UNI’s been uploading photos of its events to Flickr since 2007.
A UNI global union group has been created which affiliates can join.
All staff worldwide have been given the possibility to upload to the organisations’ Flickr account, and often use it to publish meeting photos. UNI distributes the direct link to the photo albums to meeting participants.

More help:

• Contact me: webmaster[a]uniglobalunion.org
• Visit: http://www.commoncraft.com/photosharing for a short video that tells you everything simply