do I have to have a Yahoo and/or Flicker account to be invited/join?
Yes, you need to be a Flickr member to join a Flickr group.
A thread to discuss naming threads, board policy, new thread suggestions, and anything else that has to do with board administration and maintenance. Guaranteed to include lively debate and polls. Natter discouraged, but not deleted.
Current Stompy Feet: Jon B, P.M. Marcontell, Liese S., amych, msbelle, shrift, Dana, Laura
Stompy Emerita: ita, DXMachina
do I have to have a Yahoo and/or Flicker account to be invited/join?
Yes, you need to be a Flickr member to join a Flickr group.
I'd really, really appreciate it if it were made a private group. That way, we could each keep photos "locked" in our own Flickr accounts, but then "send" them to this private Flickr group, where automatically anyone in the group could see them. That would be a huge deal easier than making every Buffista a "friend" on my Flickr contacts page. Flickr only offers security settings for "friends" and "family" and as much as I love the buffistas, it's not ideal having every Buffista privy to every one of my friends-locked photos.
The best thing about the group being private is that you only have to join once, and then after every F2F, we attendees could "send" our photos to the group and they'd automatically be made available to everyone in the group. MUCH easier than adding every person individually to all of our individual accounts.
How does the current situation (where discussions and group pools are hidden from non-members, and membership is invite-only) not meet your needs?
If you post a locked picture to a group pool, what happens? Doesn't it become visible to anyone who can see the group pool, which'd mean a member?
Photos in a group pool are visible to anyone with access to the pool, but it doesn't mean that the rest of your photos are -- so javachik could show a lot of her F2F shots to all Buffistas without having to friend everyone individually, while still limiting the extra-special ones to the maker-outers individual people she wants by way of guest passes.
Does that sound like your desired use, Java?
eta: group POOL, not POOP. If that's going on at F2Fs, I don't ever want to go again.
Yes, thanks, amych.
Sorry for brevity; on Treo.
Okay, no longer on Treo, so edited to add:
How does the current situation (where discussions and group pools are hidden from non-members, and membership is invite-only) not meet your needs?
I've got some pretty conservative friends. If they click on one of my photos in my Flickr photostream, and it happens to also be a photo that is included in the "group" photos, to the right of the photo (on my Flickr page), it will point out that the photo is also contained in the "Buffistas" photo pool. Now if that conservative friend also clicks on that "Buffistas" photo pool, then s/he will be able to see all of the "private" photos that I've sent to the "Buffistas" group. If I understand Flickr correctly, if that group is private, then the link and info won't be found on my Flickr photo page; therefore no secret entry into seeing photos that I'd only want Buffistas to see. Or, at the very least, if the group is private and they click on it, it shouldn't give them entry.
I would just open a second account for only my Buffista photos, but I think just the ones from the F2F would be too much upload for a free account. And I really don't want to pay for two Flickr pro accounts. Sorry to make this seem so complicated, but my boss, my CEO and my employees, not to mention a very conservative group of family and friends, all check my Flickr site pretty regularly. I need to keep my decadent Buffista lifestyle separate.
Edited again to add info from the page Daniel linked to:
If that conservative friend can't see those "private" photos by browsing I don't think they can see them by navigating using the Buffistas group. But it stands testing.
If photos that are private or locked are sent to any group, they become available to that group. And if a group is public, all of the photos become available to anyone who finds the group.
One of the most irksome things about Flickr is that it offers a very limited number of "privacy" settings. One can make a photo completely private, for friends, or for family (or friends and family). Having a private group that we can all send photos to effectively gives us all one more "locked" variation. For instance, I can make all of the Buffistas photos completely "private" and then send them all to the Buffistas private group. Thus you all have access to all of the photos, but they're not viewable to my friends or family (unless I also overlap those settings). So it gives each of us more flexibility in what we allow our "standard" friends and family to see. And it also puts an end to the frantic pleas and frustrations of Buffistas who need to be friended in order to see photos.
As it is, I had to de-friend some people in my personal/work life in order to properly protect the F2F photos (had to demote previous "friends" to "contacts", so that they wouldn't have access to the F2F photos, and they noticed and it was a crappy situation). If the group is private, I can simply lock ALL of my Buffista photos as "private", send them to the group, and feel secure in knowing that my colleagues won't see them but my Buffista family will.
If people really want to keep the group public, that's fine. I think everyone's had a chance to see the F2F photos, and so I'll take them down off of my account.
I thought that if the picture was in a private pool it couldn't be viewed as part of the group if you're not in the group.
ita, I am not sure I know the difference between pool and group. Are you saying that our group is public but the pool is not? I guess I always think they're synonymous? As long as there is a way to have my F2F photos made "private", and send them to a pool that only Buffistas can see, then I'm good.
ETA: I sent a "private" marked photo of Juliana, Suzi and Deb to the pool. Is there a way to check to see if a non-member has access to the photo? If there is, and s/he doesn't, that's awesome.