Using Flickr as a brand marketing tool

I’ve recently been working with the Flickr API to build a web application for use within a site that we are building at the moment.

Our client is a popular tourist attraction and they wanted their visitors to be able to share their favourite photos on the website.
We noticed that Flickr already contained many photos from this location and decided that we could use the popularity of Flickr to not only provide some of the functionality required by the client but also and a brand marketing opportunity.

We have set up a Flickr account for our client and created a group into which all of the shared photos can be placed. The application for the website has two distinct parts.

Firstly the photo gallery searches the shared group on Flickr and returns photos to display in the client’s website. Because the client has moderation control over the photos accepted into the group, they do not need to worry about inappropriate content being displayed on their website.

The second part of the application allows visitors to the website to upload their photos for sharing. Our client then has the opportunity to moderate the submissions and then the image is watermarked with the client’s website URL and uploaded into their Flickr group.

The advantage of hosting the photo gallery from flickr is that photos uploaded via the client’s website become findable to Flickr’s 16+ million visitors per month. by watermarking the images, the brand is made visible to people who have never seen the client’s website. Flickr has become a favourite service for people building new web applications so there is always the possibility that a water marked photo (and correspondingly the client’s brand) will be seen by someone who has not seen the client’s website and is not one of the millions of regular visitors to Flickr.