Using Flickr for Your Organization

While many people are aware of Flickr as a photo sharing site, there are a number of features and uses that are underutilized by organizations.

Flickr Tags

Have you ever wished that there was a way to aggregate all of the pictures that people took at one of your events? Well, with the use of Flickr tags it is possible. By deciding upon a Flickr tag for your event in advance and sharing it with your members, they can tag all the photos they took at your event. A search for that tag will result in showing all the pictures uploaded of your event. You can put the Flickr tag in your event's program, on the Facebook event, send the tag to people that have signed up, or just make an announcement at the event about it. By encouraging your members to sign up for Flickr accounts and use the accepted Flickr tag, you will have access to a lot more pictures than you could have through other means.

Flicker Groups

Flickr also has a groups feature that is useful. Have your members join the Flickr group and upload their related pictures to it. This enables an organization to have access to a wide variety of pictures of their activities to use when needed. It also will let you create slideshows that can be embedded on websites and MySpace pages.

Official Flickr Accounts

Your organization itself should create a Flickr account in order to upload and share official pictures and graphics. This allows you to create embedded photo galleries using only pictures that you approve. Photos can be organized into sets (and collections of sets with a $25/year Pro account). This way you can have a collection for each year and a set for every event, or any other organizational combination that you choose.

You can also use Flickr to host online button images so their use doesn't use too much of your website's bandwidth.

Also, check out Andy Beal's post on using Flickr groups to build traffic to your website.

Do you have any questions about using Flickr? Have you used Flickr for your organization? Leave a comment and share.