Addicted to Flickr

I finally created my own Flickr account the other Saturday (I didn't have my Harry Potter book to read, remember?) and uploaded my favorite homemade Federer wallpapers into a set called Tennis Wallpapers. Of course, I applied for a free account as I can't afford to pay the annual fee of US$24.95 to avail of more features. I did this more as a trial just to see how it is to use Flickr, to create sets, to edit photo descriptions, tags, etc. I even found out how to make a badge so that I could display a random wallpaper on the sidebar of my Federer blog. Then to try more features available on Flickr like, I slowly began to upload some of my favorite photos organize them into sets and add them to groups. (I found out that I could have just three sets and no collections with my free account. Sigh!) Since I made my photos viewable by the public, it was amusing to see which ones people would take notice of, which ones people were likely to view and tag as their favorite or even comment on.

I began to also browse other people's photos based on "interestingness" and as soon as something caught my fancy, I would tag it as my favorite and continue browsing. Eventually I began to realize that whenever I would tag a photo as my favorite, the owner of the photo was likely to browse my photostream and tag a few of mine as his or her favorite as well. Quite a friendly community. I also found out that adding one's photos to pools of other similar photos increases the chances of your photos getting viewed by others.

Anyway, it was really so addicting in a way to see all those beautiful photos other people had taken and posted on their accounts that I quickly accumulated 72 favorites by yesterday evening:
Most were made by professional photographers or else serious photo hobbyists who maintained pro accounts on Flickr. How I envy those people! I wish I could pay for a pro account to be able to see not just my most recent 200 images but all images that I could upload into my account, to have more than three sets, to organize my sets into collections...