It's a question we've been discussing here at Colgate. After co-speaking with Mark Trammel, formerly of the University of Florida IT department, at a CASE conference in April, I became even more convinced of flickr's usefulness. I had used flickr before hearing Mark rave about it, but on returning to campus we decided to use it as the means for posting major photo galleries.

We had been using a home-built photo gallery tool, and there are still applications for that on campus. But now, for the main galleries that appear on our photos page and are linked from stories, we are using flickr.

The reasons are community building, ease of use, greater visibility through powerful tagging, analytics, and improved workflow.I love seeing which photos receive the most views, for example. I like how our photos are picked up by other flickr users and how those with an interest in Colgate have contacted us.

We are, of course, relying on flickr to remain a reliable free service. Reliability is a huge concern, because it's obviously out of our hands if their site is having issues. For now, we think it's a safe bet. We have a database of all our photos, and we could use our existing gallery tool if need be.

But because we are doing more and more in terms of multimedia, we're looking for ways to streamline our workflow and get the most bang for our buck at the same time.

I was posting photos with our gallery tool and then taking the time to post them to flickr. Not a great use of my time.

You can see our photos on flickr. We're moving toward our own branded video page, but I'll save that project for another day's post.

Meanwhile, happy iPhone shopping.