A beginners guide to Flickr

Recent studies show that up to 69% of Australians own a digital camera. If we have all become so snap happy, where are all those photos going?

In this ever increasing digital age we live in, no longer do our photos need to be hidden away on hard drives and CDs, never to see the light of day. With family and friends spread out all over Australia, and the world the internet makes it so easy to share our family memories.

There are many services that allow you to store and share you photos online. One of the biggest, and best in my opinion is Flickr. It has a huge range of features and tools, and it’s so much fun!

Flickr is free, you can upload 100mb of photos each calendar month. There will always be a free version, so you need not worry about being sucked in to paying money in the future if you do not wish to. There is also pro subscription for $24.95US a year which gives you unlimited photo uploads, which is great value.

First, you will need to sign up. Flickr is part of the Yahoo! network, so you will need to sign up with a yahoo account first, if you don’t already have one.

Now your ready to get started.

There are a number of ways you can get your photos from your computer into Flickr. You can upload up to 6 photos at a time from the Flickr website. But the easiest way I think is to use the flickr uploadr. This is a little tool that you download onto your computer, once installed, all you need to do is right click a photo and select send to Flickr, it’s that easy. Once you have them all there, click the upload button and follow the prompts.

If you are a Firefox user, you can also use the Fotofox add-on,as mentioned in our Firefox add-on article.

Are you able to send emails from your mobile phone? Well you can even upload pictures to flickr straight from your phone! See Flickr’s information on uploading by email for more details.

So you have your pictures uploaded, now what?
Now you have your photos uploaded, you will want to know how to sort and share them. There are two methods to sorting your photos in Flickr, Sets and tags.

Sets are like a folder so you can group together related photos. Tags are keywords you can use to label photos for easy searching and grouping.

To create sets, add tags and sort your photos, you can use the batch organiser found in the top menu, under the logo.

You can create sets and place photos into them by going to the Sets tab then clicking create a new set. Once you have create a set is just a mater of selecting your desired photos (remember, you can select multiple items by holding down the ctrl button while clicking) from the bottom viewer and dragging them into place.

Adding tags to your photos is just as easy. Select the Batch Organise tab. Say for example you have a bunch of picture of your Siamese cats you would like to tag. Select your target photos and drag them into the editing area. Click the Add Tags button, and you will be presented with a box. Here you input the tags or keywords that will describe your photos. Think of the words you or other people might use to search for these pictures i.e siamese cat cats meezer seperate your keywords with just a space, no comma. If you have multi word tags, be sure to use double quotes around them, like so”chocolate point”.

Choosing privacy for your photos
Flickr allows you to give your photos different viewing permissions so you have complet control over who gets to see your photos. You can allow viewing by everyone, just your friends or keep them private.

Notes
I love notes, they are really nifty. Say there is something in your photo you would like to point out or label, you can put a note on the photo for others to see. See this picture, put your mouse over the picture, and the square, you will see the message appear..cool yes?

Posting your pictures from Flickr is easy too. If you click on the All Sizes icon above your photo you will be given a choice of different sizes the picture can be automatically resized into. Once you have picked your size, under the photo you will find the code that you need to copy and paste to display your picture or you can use the direct link. Just remember as per Flickr’s guidelines if you post a Flickr photo on an external website, the photo must link back to its photo page, so be sure to use option one when displaying on websites.

Flickr also integrates well with Picnik a super fun and easy online photo editing site.

So now you have no excuse for hiding your photos away, share them with the world.

Please feel free to ask if you have any questions about getting started with Flickr.