There are various reasons why photographers can’t move away from Flickr even if there have been other similar services these days. But, if we should take a single reason, the 1GB of free storage is the answer behind it all.

However, Flickr is more than that. It’s not merely a service to store your photographs but also a useful tool to build your personal brand as a photographer. If you have no personal website, Flickr can replace it to showcase your best works and let others to see them.

Unless you need a market place feature to sell your photos (Flickr market place has been closed), Flickr is the best online photo sharing platform so far. 500px is great but its free account limited to only 20 photos per week. Flickr also has more features to ease photographers in managing their photos.

There are many creative ways to get the most out of Flickr. Below are some of them.

1. Create custom URL

Unlike 500px, Flickr comes with a complex URL which is hard enough to be remembered. Your default URL will be like “https://www.flickr.com/photos/47411919@N02/”. It’s less good if your purpose of using Flickr is to build your personal brand since people will take more times to identify who is behind the URL.

But, don’t worry. Flickr gives you a chance to set a custom URL of your profile to make it looks fancier. Once set this option you will have two custom URL, one for your profile and another for your photos. Your profile URL will be like “https://www.flickr.com/people/yourname” while your photos URL will be like “https://www.flickr.com/photos/yourname“. Looks prettier. Isn’t it?. We have covered how to set this option in the previous post. Just go for to learn more.

2. Search for photos by camera

In Flickr, you can search for photos based on the camera model. This is great because you can find out the image quality of certain camera models. It’s very useful if you want to buy a certain camera model and wondering about the quality of photos taken with the camera. You can also compare the image quality between a certain camera model with another. We have also written an article on how to search for photos by camera model in Flickr.

3. Take your photos from other services to Flickr

For a certain reason you might have been switching to other photo sharing service and then realize that there’s no service better than Flickr. You decided to take all photos you have uploaded to your current service to Flickr but have no idea what to do.

No, you don’t have to re-upload your photos one by one because it’s an ancient way. You can transfer your photos from services like Google Photos, Dropbox or 500px to Flickr using a certain tool. Flick has no built-in tool to handle this but you can take advantages of some online tools. Again, we have also written an article on how to transfer your photos from other service to Flickr. You can go for it to learn more.

4. Search for Creative Commons photos

Flickr gives you some options of how to release your photos on its service. Whether you will let other users to download your photos or just viewing without giving a chance to download. Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.

To search photos that are are released under the Creative Commons license you can visit this page and type your preferred keyword on the available search box.

5. Create an album to gather your photos

Let’s say you have just returned from your trip to a beautiful island in your country and want to upload the photos you have taken. To make your photos be more discoverable and organized you can create an album to gather those photos.

6. Turn your album into a book

Flickr has a cool feature to enable you turn your albums into a photobook. The feature is pretty cool if you want to have a hard copy of your beautiful photos. This feature is priced $34.95 for 20 pages. To get started, just hover your mouse on your preferred album and click the book icon.

7. Save time by maximizing shortcuts

You can perform some actions on each photo in Flickr like adding a comment, add it into album, zoom it and lots more. And you don’t always need to click here and click there to perform a certain action. Flickr comes with a number of shortcuts which you can use to save your time and make you look geeky. Just open a certain photo and scroll down to the bottom to see the list of Flickr shortcuts.