Royal family Getting With It

In an attempt to embrace modern-day technology and to stay close to the royal subjects, the British royal family is set to unveil its new presence on the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. More than 600 images will be available for perusal Monday as part of the launch of the official "British Monarchy" Flickr account. The images, spanning generations, will be lumped into various categories for easier browsing. Each member of the current royal family will have his or her own section of shots, which will accompany various other sections for behind-the-scenes imagery, royal visits, and other pertinent topics.


However, don't expect to be able to make use of Flickr's more community-centric aspects on British Monarchy shots. According to the Associated Press, commenting will be disabled for all of the account's pictures. Users will still be able to share and embed the photographs at will, a head-nod to the monarchy's efforts to keep up with the latest social media circles on the Web.


The monarchy launched its official Twitter account just a bit over one year ago in an effort to, "harness the popularity of Twitter to spread news about the Royal Family," said a spokesperson. Though the Queen and Prince of Wales themselves don't actually do any of the updates, as one might expect, the account has already managed to accrue more than 50,000 individual followers from more than 3,600 updates.


The official YouTube channel, dubbed "The Royal Channel," is the family's longest-running account on any of the larger social media circles. Launched in late 2007, the YouTube channel has featured nearly 200 individual videos ranging from legacy United Nations speeches to procession videos. These various bits of multimedia have been viewed more than 9 million times, giving the channel 31,000 individual YouTube subscribers in the process.


Just to put the Royal Family's efforts into perspective, the official Twitter feed for the White House numbers nearly 1.8 million followers as of this article's writing—more than three times that of the British Monarchy. As well, the official White House YouTube channel has more than 30 million video views and 100,000 subscribers, and its official Flickr account—launched in February 2009—has put up 2,500 different images and counting.
The royal account can be accessed at  http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishmonarchy