Sharing photos with Flickr

This is a talk about local guide compiled by Nicky Getgood using Nick Booth’s Tips for sharing pictures with Flickr.

What is Flickr?

Flickr is a photo-sharing website. You can upload photos (and short videos up to 90 seconds long), organise and share them with other people. When you upload a photo, it has its own unique website address so you can link to individual photos or group them together in sets. You can also embed them in other other websites and blogs.

Flickr is very useful for community website managers as it provides an online space to host your images, so you do not have to upload all your images onto your website and use up the server space you have.  It is also good for sourcing images of your local area to use on your site, just remember to always attribute the photographer and link the image back to the Flickr image page.

How do I get started?

1. Create a free Flickr account (Yahoo own Flickr, so you can use an existing Yahoo account or create a new one)
2. Click on ‘Upload photos & videos’ and then ‘Choose photos and videos’. You can pick more than one. Once the list opf pictures you want to upload appears in the box then click the Upload button
3. Click ‘add a description’ you will see a list of all the photos you have just uploaded
4. You can tag all your photos at once by typing in tags (eg animal, building) and clicking add
5. You can also add them to a set ‐ which helps group them together and means you can give a single link out to a set of photos
6. You can give a title and descprition to all your photos. This gives the photos more information and helps to describe what is going on, making them more findable
7. Scroll down and click save ‐ you’ll now be on your photostream page. You can copy and paste this link to anyone and they will always see your latest photos. If you made a set, click on the thumbnail on the right hand side. You can give this link out to anyone that wants to see all the pictures in that set, even if you add some more later. If you click on the slideshow icon Flickr has automatically created a slideshow of that set, so you can sent that link out too.
8. Click on any of your pictures and then click ‘All sizes’ you’ll see a huge version of the picture. Click on ‘Small’ and there is some code that you can paste into another website to display your photo
9. When you embed a picture on Flickr (whether it is yours or someone elses under a Creative Commons licence) you should link to the picture on Flickr to encourage blog readers to explore your photos and perhaps leave a comment there

• Video: Your Flickr homepage

How do I organise my pictures?

Your Photostream always shows a list of your photos with the most recent ones at the top but you can also organise your photos by putting them into sets (like albums, eg. Launch Event or Holiday 2009) or you can give photos tags (or keywords eg. sport, architecture, birmingham).

How does tagging work?

Tags are really useful because they help you and anyone else searching for photos find out more about the photo. Really good tagging makes your photos more findable which can lead to new contacts on Flickr, perhaps people working in your area or other people interested in your work.

You can also use tags to gather together lots of people’s pictures from an event for example by creating a unique tag (eg tal10) and link to it http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/tal10/

You can also embed it as a slideshow onto your website:

View the Flickr slideshow

How do I insert an image on Flickr into my website?

Flickr does some useful things like automatically making small versions (thumbnails), medium-sized and larger versions of your photos, which you can then put on your website or insert into a blog post.

1. To insert a single Flickr image onto your website go to the Flickr image page, and click on ‘all sizes’ just above the image.
2. Choose the size of the image you want to appear.  Medium is usually the best size for a blog post picture.
3. Copy the image location of the resized image, which can be done by right clicking over the image in most browsers.
4. Ensure the In the ‘add an image’ option of the toolbar above your website’s New Blog Post text box, paste the image location into the space beside Image URL and press Insert.

Using Flickr for more

At it simplest, Flickr can be used as an online photo library for individual or group but it is much more powerful as a way of making new connections with people on and offline.  To learn more about how you can connect with members of the Flickr community, read Nick Booth’s Tips for sharing pictures with Flickr.