Flickr: Sharing Your Photos Free & Easy Online
Filed Under episode, how-to, photos, screencast, sharing, social, tutorial
Episode 8 -
So, you just got (or have been using) a digital camera for your family. Once you figured out how to put those pictures on your computer instead of having to develop all that film, you realized the possibilities were endless.
Now you have 1,000 pictures on your hard drive and you don’t know what to do with them 
.
Most all of the people I know struggle with this. It would cost a fortune to print those pictures; it would take ages to try and mail them, and you don’t know how to resize them for email (we’ve all received those emails where all you can see in the picture is someone’s right eyeball because the picture is so darn huge!).
And to top it all off, you don’t know how to “download them to the internet” (as I hear it so commonly said).
Enter Flickr.
Thanks to Flickr, it can be MUCH easier to share your photos than you think. With the ability to upload on a whim without worries about size, avoid flooding people’s inbox, the ability to run slideshows, and link directly to your photos, Flickr has truly made this seemingly daunting task of uploading your photos to the web a joy and not a chore.
Another reason to consider Flickr over it’s competitors is that it is owned by Yahoo!. This means there is very little chance of Flickr going down overnight as a result of bad business and losing all your photos. For those who want to use online photo sites as a kind of secondary back up, this is very important.
So let’s get this buggy movin’!
Getting Set up:
You are going to need a Flickr account before you can upload anything.
- Just go to flickr.com and click “Create Your Account”
- Sign up with your info (if you already have a Yahoo! account, this will be especially brief)
- Once you are confirmed, just sign in to get started
Getting Photos Online:
Ok, you’ve got your flickr account, a million photos to upload, and a healthy amount of determination. Here are some things you should know at the get go:
- With the free account, you can only update up to 100mb of photos each month (30-70 photos, depending on the size photos your camera takes)
- With the paid account (only $25 a year) you can upload as much as you want
- Use a photo uploader to add photos to your account to keep things as easy as possible
- You CAN make photos private so that only you, or designated others, can view them
For the Brave: Flock, a browser for all platforms and very similar to Firefox (even runs most Firefox add-ons), integrates extremely well with Flickr. If you are adventurous, try it out. It’s really great!
The most basic way to upload a photo is to click “Upload photos” on your flickr page after signing in.
You can add photos simply by clicking “browse” next to one of the 6 fields provided.
You can also see your monthly allowance, set the level of privacy you want on the photos you are uploading, and you can quickly add a tag to them (ex: “Disneyland Trip”) to help others (including yourself) find them later by using keywords.
Also on this screen is “Uploading Tools“. I highly recommend clicking this and downloading an uploader for your computer to ease uploading multiple photos. For this article I will be using the jUploadr since it supports Windows, Mac, and Linux (but feel free to try the “official” uploader for your Operating System).
After downloading the appropriate version (in my case, Windows), I unzip it to a folder on my computer and click jUploadr.exe to start it up. (if this sounds too complicated to you, just download the official Flickr Uploadr) Mac users just drop jUploadr into your applications folder, as usual. For the official how-to for all versions, click here.
Once jUploadr is up, just do the following to connect it to your Flickr account (make sure you are already signed in to Flickr):
- Click Edit > Preferences
- Click Authorize jUploadr
- Click “Authorize” on the pop-up you will see
- Flickr will display a page in your browser confirming that jUploadr is “Authorized” (or it may ask you to confirm).
- Finally, go back to jUploadr and click “Complete Authorization”
- If every thing went ok, you should see this message:
It’s all downhill from here .
Uploading Photos Using jUploadr
This is the pay-off. From now on, uploading your photos is as simple as dragging-and-dropping your files into jUploadr! Here’s an example:
Here are my photos from my recent trip to Italy that I didn’t go on.
I drag a box around them and drag them all into jUploader.
Just double-click any of these photos to modify their upload settings (if you want)
When I’m ready, I just click upload!
When all the pictures are checked off, that means that you are done with the upload. Just go to your flickr page to take a look at them! They’re online… Now what?
There is so much you can do with these photos from this point forward, but we are just going to focus on the most common task.
Sharing with friends and family online
To link people to a specific photo, just click the photo in your flickr account and click the “all sizes button“.
Then you can use the link provided to link others via email, chat, etc.
If you wanted to share the whole batch of photos that you just uploaded, probably the quickest way is using tags. Sets are great too, but they are limited to 3 for free accounts, so we will use the tags example for this article.
The quickest way to get this done (rather than tagging your photos one-by-one) would either be to tag them while in jUploader or to do the following:
Click the little arrow next to Organize and click “Most recently uploaded photos”
This automatically allows you to edit your last uploaded batch as a group
Next click “Add Tags” and enter in something relevant (use quotes if it is more than one word)
Now if you visit one of your pictures, you will see a tag on the right side of it
By clicking that, you will be taken to a view that shows only pictures with that tag… kind of like a folder.
Just copy the address in your address bar (at the top of your browser) and now you can link people just to these pictures! They can even come view it as a slideshow.
Beyond This
Most users of the paid account say that it is worth every penny. Unlimited uploads, sets, and more means that you can really use Flickr to it’s maximum. At $25 a year (at the time of this article), if you take a lot of pictures, this is a no-brainer.
For those of us who couldn’t max out the monthly upload limit if we wanted to, Flickr still stands as one of the net’s best free services. But there are other ways you can spend your money at Flickr.com; from having prints made, to making custom coffee mugs, to professional picture books.
I’ll leave you with a couple links to some extras:
Camera Finder : Which are the best cameras for digital photographers? Graphs and more found here.
Do More with your Photos! : Lots of cool ways to print and use your photos.
Flickr Programs : Some free, some paid. Many cool. This is where I found jUploadr.
All this and we didn’t even get into the social capabilities of Flickr for networking with friends, family, or photographers with similar interests. And Greasemonkies (see my Greasemonkey video/article if you are not familiar with what it is) and don’t forget to see what you can do with Flickr at Userscripts.org. It’s all there and more if you want to pursue it!
Have fun with your photos.
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6 Responses to “Flickr: Sharing Your Photos Free & Easy Online”
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Hi Garrett: I just went through the tech bite on Flickr. Is this better than say Sam’s çlub.com? Does Flickr have any editing capabilities? My interest is printing some of my photos from my hard drive, but they do need to be edited first (the way I can at Longs).
Ya, like I said above.
How many comments do I have to send?
I think I’ll stop now.
Thanks, good bye.
Hi Candy.
You only have to send one
.
Flickr is an image-storing service, so it won’t do you any good as far as image-editing goes.
http://www.picnik.com is awesome however, and will allow you to edit your photos to your heart’s content. I think I will to a video on this soon.
-Garrett