During the past three decades, Particle image velocimetry (PIV) has evolved rapidly to be the dominant method in experimental fluid mechanics and has contributed to many advances in our understanding of turbulent and complex flows.In this paper, we provide a brief review the achievements of PIV and its latest developments: e.g., time-resolved PIV;statistical PIV;tomographic PIV.In the actual implementation of PIV, however, there are a lot of pitfalls that may lead to inaccurate or even erroneous results.Therefore, we compile our knowledge and experience about PIV accumulated over past years, and provide some practical guidelines for its implementation in practice to obtain accurate results.This paper focuses on the application of PIV in investigating the hydrodynamics of cylindrical structures, since it is fundamental in many engineering applications such as heat exchange tubes, transmission lines, piers, pipelines, risers.A wide range of flow configurations are considered, including: (a) a cylinder (circular/square) placed in proximity to a wall boundary;(b) two tandem cylinders (circular/square) placed in proximity to a wall boundary;(c) multiple cylinder arrays;(d) cylinders with rough surface for drag reduction;(e) cylinder undergoing vortex-induced vibration (VIV);and so on.