Flickr is a media sharing community website allowing its users to hoist photos and videos. As on June 2009, this website claims that it has more than 3.6 billion photos.

Flickr was developed by Ludicorp. It is a Vancouver based company that developed this initially as a massively multiplayer online game. During its initial release, this website allowed its users to chat online and share photos rather to store media on its back end. Later it dropped the chat feature and emerged as photo repository.

Yahoo acquired both Ludicorp and Flickr in 2005 and moved all servers from Canada to United States.
The start of this website is accidental, when Caterina Fake when one of her British Columbia based online game company created a tool to share photos. It gained huge popularity in photo sharing websites and seen an increase of 448% in its users from December 2004 to December 2005.

Development:

The Flickr was acquired by Yahoo on March 2005. During the first week of June 2005, Yahoo moved all of the servers from Canada to US. Flickr is free to register and use. In December 2006, it increased the space from 20MB to 100MB.

On April, 2008 this website allowed to upload videos for paid subscribers. The uploaded videos are limited 90 seconds and 150 MB.

Flickr announced a set of API's which allow developers to integrate photos into their own websites and applications and allows its users to tag their photos which enables quick search of their photos. A 'tag' is a keyword which relates to the photo.

You can also organize your photos into sets or groups of photos and also categorize a photo into more than one photo album.

Benefits to users:

Flickr allows to share photos to the world. You can upload, categorize and tag your photos. You can use the Flickr API to easily integrate into other websites and applications. Flickr allows cool feature such as Geo tagging, the camera model with which you photographed.

Free space of 100 mega bytes per month to upload your photos. This website can be easily used by anyone who knows to browse internet can upload their photos. With its huge audience base, and you get noticed for your photos and promote your products or services.

Technical explanation:

To use this website to upload your photos, you need to register with it. If you are having Yahoo account, you can directly login to it.
After you register and login to your account, you can start uploading photos. Go to "upload photos" section from your home page. Click on "choose photos" link to select photos you want to upload.

You can set privacy level to your photos which allows only your friends to view yours. After the uploading completes, you can name photos, tag them and finally click save.

Without registering on Flickr you can search other users photos(which have public access) and also save them.

Adoption:

Flickr gained quick adoption from internet users. The quick success of this website lies in its easy to use interface and also free photo hosting.

You can also use this website as a photo repository which can be used to host photos and linked to your website.
Photos can also be uploaded to Flickr from desktop without visiting the website. You need to download a desktop client "Flickr Uploadr".

Flickr partnered with Getty images to sell stock photos of some users. If you use iPhone (ver 8) you can upload your photos directly to this website.

Worldwide usage:

Flickr is the second most used photo sharing community today and is presently facing competition with other photo sharing websites such as Picasaweb,Photobucket, and Webshots. Flickr is one of the first photo sharing website and so it is used world wide.