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 4x6 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.