Gift Ideas for the Flickr Fanatic
I love flickr. I really really do. No longer do I litter my hard drive with gigs and gigs of scattered photographs kept in folders all named some variation of 101MSDCF. I keep my 5,500+ photos easily accessible on flickr, organized with photo sets and abundant tags. So how can you add on to flickr’s greatness for a phenomenal gift for the flickrite in your social ring? You’re about to find out.
Official Flickr Gifts
Let’s cover the basics first. If your flickr friend doesn’t yet have a Pro account, that should obviously be your gift to them. To top things off, Flickr recently eliminated the 2GB per month upload limit for Pro users - it’s now unlimited! Giving the gift of Flickr is easy too, you can purchase a one year Pro account for $24.95 and get a snazzy gift certificate card to hand out.
By the way, there’s a nifty Christmas easter egg going around - leave a note on a flickr picture with the text “ho ho ho hat” or “ho ho ho beard” for a Santa-styled hat or beard.
Printable Goodies
Printing out some of your friend’s favorite photos would be an excellent flickr-companion present. You can always just print them out the regular way through flickr, but seeing as how it’s the holidays why not get creative with it?
QOOP is a printing company that can do MANY things with your flickr photos. No, seriously - many things. Okay fine, let me read them out to you: prints, calendars, greeting cards, photo books, mugs, mini photo books, posters, shirts & hoodies, myCards, photo disks, puzzles, luggage tags, keychains and mousepads. Tabblo can also create similar printable items and supports image uploading.
However, if you’re going to be doing this for a friend, you’ll need to somehow get your hands on their flickr login to authenticate QOOP. I recommend setting up a scenario at said flickr friend’s house and subliminally encouraging them to take out the trash or start cooking dinner. All you need is five minutes to jump on their computer.
Also on Flickr’s do more page is Zazzle. By clicking Order Prints » Zazzle on any flickr picture you can create real, customizable US stamps. There’s nothing like sending off a letter with your mug stamped on it.
Last in the printable goodies section are Moo’s flickr cards - an innovative approach to quasi-business cards.. I think. Regardless, they’re just cool and you can get 100 made for $19.99. Why not print out 100 cards of that night your friend [insert embarrassing or awkward moment] so they’ll never forget?
If you’re more of the DIYer, you can develop a unique gift with fd’s flickr toys and print it out yourself. My personal favorite is the toy that lets you create those Motivator posters.
Picture Gadgetry
Photojojo has really cool products for photograph connoisseurs. There’s the wood photoblock kit ($25) pictured below that would be a great complement to your flickr friend’s favorite 4×6 photo. Then there is the magnetic photo rope ($12) which lets you orient 8 photos along the stylish 43-inch cable with included magnets. Oh and then there’s the… ah, go check it out for yourself.
While we’re on the subject of low-tech picture accessories, you can pickup a neat picture frame from Amazon that’s made of two huge pieces of acrylic held together by magnets.
When it comes to high-tech picture frames, there’s lots of competition but nothing is as advanced as this Wi-Fi enabled picture frame. Give it a flickr RSS 2.0 feed and it will save pictures from the feed to a MMC/SD/MS/CF card while displaying them on the 7-inch LCD screen. On the other end of the spectrum is TAO’s $47 digital picture keychain featuring a 1.4-inch color LCD screen.
Cameras
If your good friend has to put up with a finicky old digicam, a new camera could be just the ticket for a happy holiday. Flickr’s camera finder will give you a good idea of what everyone’s using and how the pictures turn out. For the typical $300 compact digital camera, the Canon SD600 is a hot seller. More involved photographers will appreciate the extra features of the entry-level Canon Rebel XTi DSLR. Oh and don’t skimp on the memory card - you can’t take that many pictures with 32MB. Flash media is rather cheap these days so go ahead and add a 2GB card to your cart while you’re in the giving mood.
And finally, yeah it’s almost over, a mobile phone that supports ZoneTag makes for a top-notch gift. ZoneTag is a mobile application developed at Yahoo! Research Berkeley that makes seamlessly integrates flickr with supported cameraphones. Most importantly, it automatically adds tags of your location when you take the picture. For example, if you browse photos with the ZoneTag tag, you’ll see that most have tags similar to the image on the right.
I had the chance to play with a ZoneTag phone at Yahoo! and it’s more than just a novelty, it’s downright addictive.
In addition, if you connect a bluetooth GPS unit to your ZoneTag-enabled phone you can get ZoneTag to geotag uploaded flickr pictures for you. Tom Coates from Yahoo! goes into more depth about the process.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this holiday shopping guide. Do you know of any flickr-related gems that would work well on this list? Let me know.
Flickr rocks. And from the first time I saw their website I am addicted to this service. And from the first time I heard about web 2.0 and all this webdesigner-only crap, I thought that if there is one company that truly deserves to be called what I understood to be a web 2.0 thing, it was flickr. Constantly there were updates of some sort, even in some relation to what people wanted to see to be implemented in their forums. And this holiday/christmas things now are also something I did not really expect. And who started it? Flickr. And now the others can follow.
Flickr rocks.
Hey Paul,
I have been reading your blog for roughly a year and that was one of the best posts. Great work. I never thought of asking for a flickr pro account for Xmas, now I am kicking myself. But yeah, a sweater will be pretty much the same. >:[
Stan
Idea Thunderdome
Great post. Flickr examplifies Web 2.0 to the highest degree… it’s only natural to give some Flickr-love to friends this Christmas :)
Very nice Paul. I’m loving this! :P
All I can think about is the sheer number of guys in Darth Vader costumes who must have been left out of that picture.
I love Flickr as well. The only thing I wish they could handle is RAW camera files. I like the idea of using Flickr as a storage medium, but for somebody shooting in RAW or very high resolution it doesn’t cut it. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is the best photo sharing community.
Good post, now back to Flickr.
Man, am I a Flickr fanatic? I sure hope so, that would be awesome! I wanna be a Flickr fanatic so bad, I hope I count!
I think its sweet to be a Flickr fanatic, Flickr just rocks so much, I do consider myself a true fanatic.
I recently completed a review of QOOP Photo Books and Posters and wanted to shared it with you.
To be frank i’ve only accessed Flickr once and couldnt really go through, giving me a short impression of its content and diverse inrunnings… Reading this, i checked it out - its rather raving… there’s literally so much that could be done on this site, especially with the 2.0 featurea integrated..
Only makes me wonder how they’re running this site without any storage limit for Pro users… wonder what hosting package they’re covering :S
well done sir. as even as casual photographer i’ve found that my personal and/or abstract photos are instantly accessible and open for my world to see. i’ve not only found local contacts whose art i intend to buy and met local friends whose work i appreciate, but i’ve also made some new contacts who even want to print a few of my photos for the world to see and that is the highest compliment a photobum like me could hope to ask for.
this simple (at its base) application is not just helping the average photographer like myself get better, it is also helping many living businesses find a community of amateur photographers or artists get together for not just their community but for the betterness (sic) of society at large. as such it is helping businesses from the smallest to the largest gain more appreciable content; it doesn’t matter if it’s a couch on Craigslist or a house in the hills in Hollywood. everthing gains value with the addition of visuals.
one does not have to go into a friends computer: favorite someone picture you love, the flock navigator gives you access to his pictures, and you may then drag them, as yours too, in your blog or a comment… (or, if they permit it, save it and print it)
but direct printing is still not there for us, not us citizens, but soon even in France I am sure, we will be able to command our own’s, flickr is evolving so fast, so wanderfull, from its beta days I was already there, I am sure, soooon, we’ll arrive at it too.
most important, the marveleous possibilities the groups give us, to connect