I had a great post set for today about a website and link sharing project, but we’ll postpone that for a day to talk about something that caught me by surprise. Yesterday Flickr launched a new feature called Galleries. Read the announcement on the Flickr blog for more details, but the idea is that members can create a curated gallery of up to 18 photos (or videos) of other members and share that collection as one entity.
It’s like a Flickr set, but with two major differences: you’re limited to 18 photos per gallery, and a gallery consists of other people’s photos.
It’s that last aspect that makes me pause, because that’s what makes this different than any other photo organization or sharing feature that I can think of. Flickr previously allowed Favorites, but they were only able to be presented as a giant single set (which made them less than ideal for sharing). With galleries, Flickr has presented an easy way to share other photographers’ work. One of the aspects of successful social media users is that they share, and that they share others’ work more than their own. Flickr has just made this much easier to do from within their web interface. Personally I’m going to make it a goal to create and share at least one gallery each month that showcases some of the work of my great Flickr contacts.
For an example of a Flickr gallery, check out one I created last night titled Portland Bridges.
How will you use Galleries? Have you created one yet? Post a comment and share your link!
Photo by pareeerica, used under Creative Commons licensing
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