You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to
reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in
the early days. Well, it’s true! And since you’re one of
those lovely people, here’s a little something to say YOU
ROCK!

1. Double what you paid for!
Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to
2 years, and your new expiry date is Mar 4, 2007.

2. More capacity!
Now you can upload 2 GB per month.

3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends!
This won’t be activated for a day or two, but when it
is, you’ll see a note on your home page telling you
what to do.

Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth
is and supporting us, even while we’re in beta. Your
generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are
today.

They’re right, I do ROCK!
- Chris

Edit: I have given away the first account to Derek.

Most of you will have heard of flickr as it seems to be booming with new members and loads of bloggers seem to be using flickr to host pictures for their blog.

I signed up for a free account a few weeks ago and had been browsing through the content and trying to assess the usefulness of having an account (having 3Gb of server space and another Gb backup has meant my space needs have always been more than satisfied) and how it differed from the PHP Gallery I had been using.

After just a few hours playing around with flickr I had decided that it was much better than the Gallery I had, so I thought I would use it to upload pics from now on. The only problem with this is you can only upload 10Mb of pictures per month, although this is a fair enough figure, and most of the time I wouldn’t ever generate 10Mb of pictures. However there are some times when I manage to rack up an obscene number of pictures at one (parties, ends of term – which is ever nearing, and so forth) and 10Mb (hell 50Mb) wouldn’t cut it.

So I had a look around the site to see how much a full account was, currently due to flickr still being in its beta stage the sign up fee is only $41.77 (which works out just over £20 at this time) for a year, what the hell, it’s only £20.

So I signed up to flickr pro which offers:

• 1Gb monthly upload (10Mb in free version)
• Unlimited storage capacity (only last 100 photos are user accessible in the free version)
• Unlimited bandwidth (dunno what this is for the free version)
• Unlimited photosets (limited to 3 in the free version)
• Full size images archived (smaller ones are archived in the free version)

I am sitting at the moment uploading aall my photos to flickr and am nearly finished. So far I have been able to use around 20% of the monthly limit. I fully intend to start taking more photos and try to at least put a dent in the limit each month. There has been many times this year when walking around I have thought that something would make a great picture, but have never had my camera with me, hopefully I’ll start carrying it around and taking some oportunist shots to post.

Another thing about flickr is that it seems to tie in quite nicely with both my PowerBook and PC. On my PB I can export photos to flickr using an iPhoto plugin, on WindowsXP I have a desktop uploader. flickr also allows you to post photo blog posts to many types of blog (including WordPress blogs).

Anyway, you should try it out!
- Chris