This one surprised me, but it's a good surprise. I was searching for "Hope Lutheran Shawnee" in order to see where some of the photos I'd taken were ranked on Google. My goal is to have highly-ranked photos for various churches so that potential clients can see what they can do with one of my websites and a little effort. What I discovered, however, was more encouraging than I'd hoped: among the many photos I'd taken that come up in the search were photos I had not tagged on Flickr but embedded on a website with the description.
You might not think this is a big deal, but it means that you can add a Flickr album to your church or school page, write an article with the right keywords, and somehow Google can figure out that the photos, even without adding descriptive text to the meta tags of the image.
Granted, Google gives the option of viewing the image or navigating to the website. If people just view the image, your site does not benefit. However, it's there, and some people will click on the article rather than just the single image.
This can also be huge for bandwidth. I can store full-size images on Flickr and allow people to download and enlarge them, but the photos on my own website need to be optimized for speed. Plus, my hosting company eventually limits me if too many people are using the website resources, so storing full-size images and video is a bad idea. I've always done video with Youtube, but if Flickr can work for images, that's a big deal.
While Flickr isn't unlimited, its app offers automatic uploads, and the storage is at 1TB right now, so plenty for most groups looking to add some images to websites. When you embed rather than send to Flickr, people are encouraged to engage with your website, and that's where you want them. Not on Facebook or Flickr or Youtube. Imagine creating a single account that several employees and parents could share, and then having someone organize a few albums for your website.
Good luck. Let me know if you need some help with setting it up. By the way, the photos of Hope Lutheran Shawnee that are on Flickr are the ones that link out to Satisfamily and are of girls basketball.
