You may or may not have noticed that I recently added the last three photos from my Flickr photostream to the right sidebar.

When I first registered with Flickr and created a free account, a couple months ago, I wasn't too excited. At that time I was looking specifically for a way to share private photos with friends and family members. I can do that on Flickr, but only if my friends and family are also registered members. I decided that something like Yahoo! photos or Kodak Gallery was more appropriate for my needs. (They have another benefit Flickr doesn't have: allowing people to order prints from my albums.)

A couple weeks ago, I went back to Flickr and started poking around some more. I began to see the real appeal. First of all, the organizational tools are superbly thought-out. Although your "photostream" shows your photos in the order you uploaded them, a calendar view allows you to see them by date taken. You can assign as many "tags" (keywords) to your photos as you want, and search them that way. You can group your photos into "photosets," like Kodak's albums.

And that's just your own photos. The key to Flickr is that it's a community. You can view everyone's public photos, comment on them, add notes to them, and mark the ones you like as "favorites." Depending on the license they've chosen, you can download high-resolution versions.

If you like someone's photos, you can add them as a contact, and you can promote them if you choose to "friend" or "family." You can customize the access rights of each of these levels of relationships.

Beyond contacts, the main organizing structure to the community is the groups. You can join as many public groups as you like. Once you're a member, you can join discussion forums or add your own photos to the group "pool."

Here's a Flickr community story: Sunday I added the tag "Bamako" to some of my photos. Then I wondered who else had pictures of Bamako, so I searched everyone's photos for ones tagged Bamako. I found these photos by Marouen, who is an IT volunteer in Bamako. I made him a contact and sent him a quick note (using Flickr's internal mail system), and went to bed. While I was sleeping, he read my message, saw my photos, viewed my profile, followed a link to this website, then followed another link to my portfolio site. He decided that I had skills needed by his organization and sent me a Flickr message Monday morning with his contact information. We chatted via instant messenger for a while and agreed to meet the next day. So, within 48 hours of finding his photos on Flickr, I met Marouen in person and made tentative plans to contribute to his development project here in Mali.

As if that weren't great enough ... Tuesday morning I had another Flickr message waiting in my Inbox: Kenya gave me a one-year Pro membership! She (of Ambiguous Adventure) has been reading this site for a while, saw that I was a Flickr member, and gave me this great gift. Pro membership means unlimited bandwidth for uploading photos, unlimited photosets (instead of three), and no ads (instead of the unobtrusive text ads), among other benefits.

So, all I need now is a speedy Internet connection, and I can start uploading by the hundreds ...