For you photography lovers, a great new widget we have added as part of the Favorite Widgets experience is a Flickr experience. If you aren't familiar with it, Flickr is a photo management and sharing site. The Flickr widget lets you view Flickr photos directly from your homepage!

You can access the Flickr widget by clicking on the tab in the Favorite Widgets module (you will likely see eBay as the initial tab).

When you click on the tab, you will see a grid of 10 of the most recent photos. If you put your mouse over any of the images, you can see a larger view of the photo. See below what a mouseover image looks like:

A fun way to use the widget is to customize the photos you want to see on your page. If you click on the Options link in the top right of the widget, you will bring up a screen to customize your photo viewing.

You have the option to view either "Popular" or "Most Recent" photos. "Popular" is based on Flickr's way of finding interesting photos from number of comments or number of their users who save as a favorite. "Most Recent" is exactly that -- photos that have recently been uploaded to Flickr.

You will also see two fields for "Tag" and "Member". You can narrow the photos that you see by using these features. Tags are like keywords or labels that are added to a photo to make it easier to find later. So if you put the tag of "bulldog puppies" and then click save, then you'll only see popular or most recent photos that users have tagged to include bulldog puppies. If there aren't any photos available for what you are looking for, you'll get a message letting you know.

Similarly, if you know of Flickr users you can add member names to see their photos. Remember that you'll only see their photos if that user is lucky enough to have one of their pictures included in what Flickr deems interesting/popular or if there are part of recent uploads.

You'll also see that you have the ability to either view one large image at a time or go for sensory overload and have a grid view of 10 at a time. Just choose whichever you like best! You can always use the forward and backward buttons to scroll through all the available photos.

One important note is that due to commercial licensing agreements with Flickr, we can only show you images that users have appropriately copyrighted using Creative Commons as publicly available.

You can read more about that here if you are interested: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons. It is due to these restrictions that you may not find your own photos if you are trying to search for them. You can change your own license type to Attribution Creative Commons at http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/?from=privacy to be able to view your photos through the widget, but be sure to understand which license type is right for you.

We hope you like flipping through cool photos as much as we do. As always, we would love to hear your feedback!

Learn more about the other cool things you can do with the Favorite Widgets experience.