One of the most revolutionary aspects to digital photography is not the way in which we shoot or edit pictures, it’s the way we share them.

Though you can still print out everything you shoot just like we used to in the days of film, generally speaking those days of making 4×6 prints of every shot you take and gluing them into a photo album are gone. Get with the times. This is the digital era, man. » MORE

We were talking a little earlier about Flickr Places, which seems to have now gone live - you can visit the new section of the site here.

So far I really like what I see. It’s easy, however, to forget that these pictures are not sorted by their timeliness. My first search was Beijing (it happened to be linked to from the front page) and I was immediately struck with a photograph from a riot. It took me a second to realize that while this was certainly shot in Beijing, it was actually an 18 year old picture from a riot in 1989 and though it was featured as the most prominent picture on the page, it wasn’t recent.

My second search was for home. Ontario, Canada… which produced some beautiful shots of familiar locales, complete with a map of the area, groups that are pertinent to the region, and even some weather information in the particular cities.

Every page even gives you a little reference point on a world map at the very top. It’s all quite slick, and must easier to navigate through than their “World Map” view. Check it out and let us know what you think of Flickr’s new feature.

Flickr was a smart acquisition by Yahoo - a photo sharing website that really emphasizes the social aspect of the web. It’s one thing to have a place to share photos with your friends. Flickr seems to place more value creating tools that let you share photos with the rest of the world. The upcoming Flickr Places will highlight that strength.

In 2006, Flickr added the function for Geotagging. Currently, Flickr has over 30 million geotagged photos - and according to sources the site receives a new geotagged photo every second. With all this geographical location data, Flickr has decided to do something interesting with it (beyond the ability to see the photos on a map).

The result is Flickr Places, which are pages that show the most interesting photos for a location (they call them iconic photos), the most common tags for the photos, and the most heavily trafficked photo groups. Flickr creates a separate Places page for each geographic location, organized using a human-readable URL, and they look like this one (for San Francisco):

At launch (which should be any day now) it will drill down to city level, but Flickr expects it to be able to drill down further in the future. Places will also be accessible via the Flickr API. [via O’Reilly Radar]

If you use Adobe Lightroom to edit your pictures, and Flickr to share them with the world, there’s a nice way to combine the two into a single workflow using the Flickr Uploadr - a tool from Flickr that (on its own) helps automate the process of sending pictures to your Flickr account. You just need to set it up with your account information, and away you go.

This little trick works on both Windows XP systems and in OSX almost exactly the same way, you just need to make sure the shortcut (or alias) gets into the right location.

Follow the steps provided below and you’ll be uploading to your Flickr account in no time.

Windows XP

After installing the Flickr Uploadr, you need a copy of the shortcut to it. You can either create one by right clicking the Flickr Uploadr in the Program Files folder, or copy the shortcut if it made one on your desktop.

Place the shortcut in the following folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR USERNAME]\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Export Actions

Now simply go into Lightroom and when you highlight an image (or multiple images) and click EXPORT, you will have a brand new option in the Post Processing portion of the Export dialog box.

You can select it and when you finalize the export, Flickr Uploadr will launch and automagically bring in that set of pictures for you - ready to be uploaded to your Flickr account.

Mac OSX

Find your installation of the Flickr Uploadr (should be in the Applications folder) and make an alias of it. Take this alias and move it to the following folder:

Users > [YOUR USERNAME] > Library > Application Support > Adobe > Lightroom > Export Action

Now, just like above, when you go to the EXPORT option in Adobe Lightroom, one of your post-processing options is “Flickr Uploadr”.

Want to take better pictures? Nikon School presents the Nikon Digital Learning Center, a great Flickr group that delivers loads of interesting and helpful tips and tricks to turn you into a better photographer. Experts and avid amateurs alike opine about portrait, action, travel, and close-up photography, with a bit of a bent towards Nikon technology.

I’ve only been on the group for a day now, but I’ve already learned some stuff about night shooting and heard some interesting views on how shooting RAW may affect battery life.

Visit the Flickr group today - and if you don’t have a Flickr account yet, you can join up.

As most people who use digital cameras knows, the camera records a bunch of information inside every image. This information is known as EXIF, and one of the key pieces of data it records is the camera make and manufacturer. A website known as BigHugeLabs keeps a list they update weekly which tracks the most popular cameras used on Flickr.

When people upload pictures to Flickr, they usually leave their EXIF data intact (ie. they haven’t performed any EXIF damaging editing on the file). Flickr will accumulate all the numbers and do a report every so often - which BigHugeLabs references. You can get the details on the top 10 cameras being used at any given time there.