digitaljosh
Forum Enthusiast
Flickr is a bit strange. But if you master the underlying secret, it's easy to move around. And I have the answer for you for only $39.95! Or for free, but money would be nice. 
Actually the secret is that the site was designed by super geeks in love with a web architecture called "REST". REST makes the URL actually important.
Flickr treats all of your photos as a linear list, which always gets larger. This list is called a "photo stream" and every Flickr user has one. It is the "tip" of this stream that you see when you access a user's home page.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaakel
But people traditionally don't think in terms of long lists of photos. So Flickr lets a user define "Sets" of photos, which can consist of any photo in their own stream. This is the most traditional way to organize photos, and is called an "album" elsewhere. These sets are accessible from the user's home page, too, from the column on the right. But they also have their own page
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaakel/sets/
Another, more cutting edge way to organize photos is with tags. These are just words you associate with your photos. The concept is pretty new, but it's pretty cool:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaakel/tags/
To look at my aukland photos, you'd do this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaakel/tags/aukland
What's interesting about tags is that you can look at tags across the entire site! That is, if you want to see everyone's photos tagged with "aukland" here's the URL to do that:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/aukland/
This will show all photos on flickr with that tag in a 6x4 thumbnail grid. If you click a thumbnail, you get the photo page. Like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44901675@N08/4146543378/
The confusing thing about Flickr is that, once you click on a photo, you loose the context in which you accessed it. From that single photo, you can move to another photo in the user's photostream, in any set it appears, and any group it appears. Flickr has forgotten that you got there from the aukland tag!
If I see a great photo, I will often explore what else that user has done. If the composition is something I like, I might explore the groups in which it exists. If I need to do research, I might do a tag search. That's how I use flickr.
(Note that groups are very similar to sets, except more than one person can add to them. And collections, a recently added Flickr feature, are like Sets but you can collect photos from any photostream, not just your own.)
--
'There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.'
-Ansel Adams
Actually the secret is that the site was designed by super geeks in love with a web architecture called "REST". REST makes the URL actually important.
Flickr treats all of your photos as a linear list, which always gets larger. This list is called a "photo stream" and every Flickr user has one. It is the "tip" of this stream that you see when you access a user's home page.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaakel
But people traditionally don't think in terms of long lists of photos. So Flickr lets a user define "Sets" of photos, which can consist of any photo in their own stream. This is the most traditional way to organize photos, and is called an "album" elsewhere. These sets are accessible from the user's home page, too, from the column on the right. But they also have their own page
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaakel/sets/
Another, more cutting edge way to organize photos is with tags. These are just words you associate with your photos. The concept is pretty new, but it's pretty cool:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaakel/tags/
To look at my aukland photos, you'd do this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaakel/tags/aukland
What's interesting about tags is that you can look at tags across the entire site! That is, if you want to see everyone's photos tagged with "aukland" here's the URL to do that:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/aukland/
This will show all photos on flickr with that tag in a 6x4 thumbnail grid. If you click a thumbnail, you get the photo page. Like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44901675@N08/4146543378/
The confusing thing about Flickr is that, once you click on a photo, you loose the context in which you accessed it. From that single photo, you can move to another photo in the user's photostream, in any set it appears, and any group it appears. Flickr has forgotten that you got there from the aukland tag!
If I see a great photo, I will often explore what else that user has done. If the composition is something I like, I might explore the groups in which it exists. If I need to do research, I might do a tag search. That's how I use flickr.
(Note that groups are very similar to sets, except more than one person can add to them. And collections, a recently added Flickr feature, are like Sets but you can collect photos from any photostream, not just your own.)
--
'There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.'
-Ansel Adams
