The folks at http://flickr.com/ have set up a creative place for folks to share their digital images. Flickr makes it easy to find photos of things you want to see, and allows you to meet other people and converse in a uncompromising way.

The free account at Flickr will show up to 100 of your photos total. When you get to 100, you can either stop there, delete some and add others, or pay the yearly membership fee. The monthly upload is based on size of the photos and not the actual number. After you upload your first photo of the month, go back to the upload page and it will give you the percentage of the bandwidth you have used. If it says you have used 10% after the first photo you can figure on being able to upload 9 more but if it says 5% then you should be able to upload twice that many, provided they are all the same size.

Tags are sorta like search terms, like when you go to Yahoo search and type in cat to find web pages on cats. You can go to Flickr tags and type in cat and it will show you everybody's photos of cats. You can make it anything you want. If you have a photo of a cat that you got in Boston and the cat reminds you of your aunt then your tags could be cat boston aunt and that would be just fine. More likely they would be something like cat porch sleeping so that folks would know what you were talking about, but that is up to you.

Tags also can be arranged in all kinds of interesting ways. On that same Flickr tag page you will find the top tags used in the last 24 hours, in the last week, and the all time most popular tags. This will tell you exactly what the rest of the world is looking at.

Contacts are just folks on Flickr that you want to keep track of for whatever reason. It might be that you know them or just like their photos. If someone makes you their contact, whenever you post new photos she will see them on the first page when she signs in. Your contacts cannot find out anything about you that wasn't there before they made you a contact; it is just a way of keeping track of photos they like.

The second level of familiarity is that of friend, and if you plan to upload photos that you only want people you know to see, you can designate these people as friends and assign your photos accordingly. You can also give people the privilege of being considered family for the highest level of privacy.