FROM its icing-sugared mountains to its Highland Toffee cattle, Scotland is undeniably a photogenic country. Indeed, some parts - the Forth Bridge, Eilean Donan castle - have been snapped so excessively that when you visit they appear less as real scenes and rather more like postcards writ large.

There is, however, an army of photographers whose collected works are building up a picture of a more complex Scotland. Their Scotland is often less straightforwardly picturesque, although it remains beautiful for the most part. They are, largely, amateurs with digital cameras. Many of them take photographs every day, wherever they find themselves, and post the best on Flickr.com, the photo website.

Flickr was launched in 2004 by two Canadians, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, who subsequently married. Their offspring, the website, will shortly celebrate its third birthday. It has grown prodigiously and now has four million users who have posted more than 320 million photos. Most of these photographs are public, meaning that anyone can look at and comment on them. A lot of people use Flickr as a glorified album; it's simply where they store their snaps - holidays, family, friends - rather than getting prints made. The site is also something of an accidental forum for so-called citizen journalism; images from the July 7 terror attacks were online within minutes.

Others use the site to showcase their skills. Talking to Flickr users, you often find that they enjoyed taking pictures when they were younger, but the advent of digital cameras has whetted their photographic appetite and sharpened their ability. "You can fire away like a machine gun without a whole lot of cost and just throw away the duds," explains Stuart Robertson, a Flickr user from Hamilton. "That allows you to experiment a whole lot more. With film you wouldn't necessarily take risks because 36 shots later you were out of film again."

The Scotland group on Flickr has more than 2000 members and 34,000 pictures. There are also many smaller, more specialised groups, either under the Scottish umbrella or dealing with specific areas or aspects of the country. Glasgow Bloc, for example, is a group specialising in "brutalist towerblocks, spartan shopping centres and utilitarian civic buildings". Edinburgh At Night is more self-explanatory.

Flickr is not dominated by the big cities, however. There are people with cameras everywhere, even if just in their mobile phones, which means you can type the name of pretty much any Scottish town or village into Flickr's search engine and you will be able to see photographs of that place, Lerwick to Lockerbie, Barra to the Bass Rock. Many of them are mundane, but it is surprising and pleasing just how many good photographers are out there.

Calum Davidson, who lives in the Black Isle, is an administrator of the Scotland group. Impressed by the wealth of high-quality pictures being uploaded, he set up the Flickr Scotland blog (www.flickr-scotland. blogspot.com) as a platform for the best pictures of Scotland. "We now have a year's worth of photographs covering all aspects of life, landscape, light and activity," he says. "It's almost a diary of contemporary Scotland."

In compiling the following showcase of the best photographs of Scotland on Flickr, magazine picture editor Lian Thomson and I chose from the images on Davidson's blog. The quality is so high that, had space allowed, we could have shown far more than the 17 reproduced here. We tried to arrive at a selection which demonstrated a geographical spread, and also to avoid showing too many pictures of beautiful landscape. There are many terrific pictures like that on Flickr, but there is so much more to Scotland than vistas; Justin Qian Yijun's God's-eye view of fish and chips, for example, is more evocative of the Scottish seaside than a million panoramic shots of the coast could ever hope to be.

Other than that, our only criteria in choosing a photograph was that we liked it. As Flickr users have coded identities, we didn't know anything about the photographers when we selected the pictures - whether they were male or female, professional or amateur, or where they were from. The result is a fascinating range of images demonstrating not only the diversity of this country, but also the talent of the photographers within it.

We hope you enjoy the photographs, and may even be inspired to pick up a camera for yourself.

ST ANDREWS SQUARE IN THE SNOW (previous pages) By John Waterson, 36, software developer, Glasgow "There was a freak storm one Saturday night. I had been at the pub, but at half-past-two was back home and still awake. I jumped outside with my camera and tripod. My neighbour looked at me like I was seven kinds of crazy.

"The orange street lighting was the only available light. But by the time I had tweaked the camera settings and then tried to fix it on the computer to get the snow accurately white, the sky came out as a curious yellow. So the colour is a happy accident."

Flickr ID: JDW WEMYSS BAY RAILWAY STATION By Stuart Robertson, 35, field service engineer, Hamilton "I keep a shortlist of places to visit with my camera, and had been aware of the station for a while. It's from a bygone era when buildings had to be beautiful as well as functional. That needs to be recorded, because no one's going to build anything like it today.

"The geometric shapes - curves and circles and arches - are what make this photograph work. You could sit and look at it for ages. The other thing I like is that towards the edge of the frame there's a vanishing point where the platform disappears into the distance. It is one of my best pictures. I'm very proud of it."

Flickr ID: StuartRobertson GLASGOW SUNRISE By Colin Milligan, 39, eLearning researcher and consultant, Glasgow "It was 7.15 in the morning. Luckily I had a camera to hand. The sunrise was over within about 30 seconds of this picture being taken. I live at the top of a hill in the west end of Glasgow, and this view from my window is toward the south-east. I think the chimney is the distillery at Port Dundas. Someone described it as a cloud factory. It's always puffing, come rain or shine."

Flickr ID: bicameral HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BIG TAM By Rod Irvine, 46, marketing executive, Edinburgh "This was during the Edinburgh Film Festival. It was Sean Connery's 76th birthday and he was being interviewed and presented with an award at Cineworld in Fountainbridge. I was in the audience, about 20-30 feet away. It's a stroke of luck that he seems to be looking straight at me.

"Technically this pic is dreadful - the lighting was poor, I didn't have flash or the lens I needed, and I've had to crop from a much larger image - but I love the cheeky smile and the twinkle in his eye."

Flickr ID: Rod Monkey ASTRONAUT, EXPLORER AND DINOSAUR By Barry Farquharson, 37, office worker at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee "I was in Edinburgh with my pal, and we were down at Our Dynamic Earth. I saw these people wandering about in costumes. The dinosaur sat down first, then the other two appeared and sat down beside it, and I thought, That's got to be a picture.' Right place, right time. It's my most popular photo on Flickr. I think people look at it and go, What the hell's going on there?'"

Flickr ID: Stonefaction LOONIES By Gareth Harper, 38, professional photographer, Largs "In South Queensferry, on the first of January, they have the Loony Dook. People dress up, parade down the High Street, then go and jump into the water. Why is it in black and white? Well, why not? I take a lot of black and white pictures. Somebody once said to me, Gareth, you shoot instant history.' "For a number of years, since I first heard about the detention centre in Dungavel, I have also been photographing the refugee situation in Scotland. The tabloids portray asylum seekers as faceless numbers, but they are just ordinary people and I want to give them faces. It's important to document their fighting for survival."

Flickr ID: Cearstaidh; www.photoecosse.net; www.camcorderguerillas.net FISH & CHIPS @ ANSTRUTHER By Justin Qian Yijun, 26, logistics officer in a high-tech company, Singapore "My home town is Shanghai, in China, and before I travelled to study at St Andrews University, I had never eaten fish and chips before. The local folks said the Anstruther Fish Bar is very famous for its food, so I went with two friends. I didn't move the things on the table around much; just pushed the cans together. My friends did really well in waiting for the picture to be finished, although extremely tempted by the top-class fish and chips."

Flickr ID: Justin Qian LOCH DUICH FROM EILEAN DONAN By Paul Hart, 31, web developer, Glasgow "I was going up to Skye for the weekend with a few friends. It was 11 at night. We stopped for coffee and a bite to eat. There wasn't much light, but I took a long exposure, five or ten seconds. The moonlight helped. There were also cars in the distance. You can see the red line of their lights about halfway down the photograph."

Flickr ID: Atomic Jeep GEORGE SQUARED By Tom Parnell, 26, architectural archivist, Edinburgh "These are the university buildings surrounding George Square in Edinburgh. The building in the background is David Hume Tower. The university library is in the foreground. I tried to fill the frame as much as possible, partly to be provocative. A lot of people think those buildings are ugly, but I find them exciting compared to the chocolate box Edinburgh we are used to. I like the materials, the geometry, and the fact that it's a really dynamic, modern part of the city."

Flickr ID: ITMPA THE WALK HOME By Brittany Byrd, 23, masters student, Texas (living in Edinburgh) "When I lived in Marchmont, this was my walk home. It's one of the paths through the Meadows, between Edinburgh University and Bruntsfield Links. It was spring and the trees were beautiful. I take photographs because I want to capture a moment. I post on Flickr because it's a good way for my parents and friends to keep up with what I've been doing."

Flickr ID: BByrd GRANGEMOUTH OIL REFINERY HDR By Duncan Smith, 38, software engineer, South Queensferry "Grangemouth is a symbol of the sorts of dilemmas our society faces regarding energy. Although very industrial, in a certain light it has a functional beauty. I'd really love to have access internally. It would be an amazing place to photograph.

"This picture was taken using a technique known as HDR, or high dynamic range'. Cameras are limited when it comes to taking pictures of subjects which have a lot of contrast between bright and dark areas. But with HDR you take a number of pictures at different exposures, and then use the computer to combine those into one image. It helps you to get something closer to what the eye actually sees than what you could achieve with a regular photograph."

TONY BLAIR SUCKS By Aaron Dron, 23, web developer, Dalgety Bay "I don't like the sort of posed street photography, where you ask, Hi, can I take your picture?' I want to show things as they really are. So what I do is shoot literally from the hip, without looking through the viewfinder. The people are unaware that I am taking their photograph.

"This picture was taken on Princes Street. I noticed people were actually donating money to this man, whereas usually in Edinburgh most people walk past these homeless guys. His sign was either a tactic for getting money, or he was expressing a real opinion, but either way it was interesting."

Flickr ID: tinyblob Tinyblob.com COLD MOUNTAIN By Tim Rogers, 40, web designer, Ballindalloch, Banffshire "Speyside Cooperage is near where I live. Round the back they have these mountains of empty whisky barrels. The smell of single malt hangs in the air on a cold still day.

"My wife and I moved here from London. There's all sorts to photograph - pheasant shoots, cattle, RAF manoeuvres, squashed seagulls, you name it. Once you start looking around with a photographic eye, you see pictures in everything.

It's a way of stopping and looking and noticing the beauty in the world."

Flickr ID: Project 404 WAITING FOR THE RAIN TO STOP By Joe Crofts, 30, IT professional, Glasgow "On holiday in Shetland, my partner and I drove up to Sumburgh Head. I got within 10 feet of the puffins. It was chucking it down and really windy, and the birds were just sitting and staring out on the sea. This is a very morose looking puffin. I felt quite sorry for it when I looked at the picture."

Flickr ID: Joe Soap THE SKYE CONTAINED By Victoria Cormie, 41, librarian, Windygates, Fife "Coming back from holiday in the Outer Hebrides, I saw these kids playing in the water. I realised that the sun was setting beneath the Skye Bridge and that it would be a good picture. I was surprised the splash under the boy's foot came out so clearly.

"My pictures are fairly crap when they come out of the camera, and I do a lot of work on them afterwards. Playing around on the computer gives you freedom. You can lie to a certain extent. I can colour sunsets that were never that red. Some people consider that cheating, but I make no apologies. I'm trying to create an impact regardless of how it's achieved."

Flickr ID: Viche A GOOD WALK SPOILED By Gary Williamson, 42, food wholesaler, the Black Isle "I took this picture from a paraglider, 700 feet above Invergordon golf course. I was struck by how abstract it seemed. A lot of what interests me is how man shapes the land, through forestry or farming or whatever.

"I've been paragliding for about nine years, and added a motor a year ago. Now that I'm powered it gives me more time to take pictures. When you are just gliding, you spend so long concentrating on catching thermals."

Flickr ID: upnorthme www.garywilliamson.co.uk JOHN O'GROATS By Ben Roberts, 27, professional photographer, London "My dad and I took a road trip to the far north of Scotland. We stopped to buy a newspaper at the Post Office in John O'Groats, and I knew I had to take that photo. Behind the counter there was a tiny old lady with a shock of white hair and dressed in Royal Mail red. But when I went back in with my camera she had gone round the back and wouldn't come out.

"I'm happy with this picture, but wouldn't have it as part of my portfolio. I've been working on a project called The Weekenders, about people who go down to Bournemouth and party hard all night. I visit the beach about seven in the morning and take portraits of people who haven't been home."

Flickr ID: bennybedlam www.benrobertsphotography.com To view Flickr for yourself go to www.flickr.com; for the blog go to: www.flickr-scotland.blogspot.com