Flickr announced on its blog last week that the site now has a feature called “Galleries.” This new tool allows you to bring together up to 18 publicly-available Flickr images into a single spot, along with a title, introductions, and descriptions of each photograph.

You can get an overview of how it works at http://www.flickr.com/help/galleries/ but after looking at that I decided it’d be easier to jump right in. In honor of the upcoming North Carolina State Fair, I decided to do a “Fried Fair Food” gallery, because it’s always — ALWAYS — weirder than I remember.

Accumulating the images was easy. I just started doing searches. As I found items I liked, I just clicked on the Add to Button gallery above each photo. The first time I was prompted to add a gallery because I didn’t have any yet, but after that it was just a matter of adding them to each gallery.

After I had a reasonable number of photos, I clicked on the “You” at the top of my nav section and got a link to Your Galleries. I was presented with the page of pictures I’d saved. Reordering them was as easy as dragging and dropping, and at the same time I also had the option to write a short caption by each image. You can see the resulting small gallery at http://www.flickr.com/photos/researchbuzz/galleries/72157622287057199/. (Want to see lots of galleries? Check out http://www.flickr.com/galleries/.

On the one hand I really like this, on the other hand I’m worried that I’m going to spend a lot of free time now going through the Commons and organizing photos into galleries. Nice feature, and very easy to use.