Getting Photos Online with Flickr
Flickr is fairly different from the other consumer-oriented online photo sites such as Shutterfly and Snapfish. Part of Yahoo, Flickr caters to a much wider online community than just photography buffs. It’s less interested in selling you prints and other items and more focused on providing a forum where visitors can share photos and other interests. For example, when you log on to the site, you see not only your own photos, you also see a sampling of photos that other Flickr members have recently uploaded. Whatever your passionwhether it’s hiking, baseball, or manhole coversyou’ll find plenty of folks to share photos with on Flickr.
Note: That’s not to say Flickr doesn’t want to sell you things. You’ll get offers to print your photos or put them on postage stamps. In fact, Yahoo would love you to upgrade to a Pro account (about $25 per year), which buys you unlimited storage, ad-free browsing, and the ability to upload more than 20 megabytes of photos each month.
Perhaps because Flickr has so many different types of members submitting photos from computers, cafés, and cellphones around the world, the site gives you at least three ways to upload your pictures: using an online form in any Web browser; via email; or with a free, downloadable drag-and-drop tool called Uploadr. (Evidently Yahoo is saving money on vowels.)
1. Uploading Photos with Your Browser
You can upload photos to your Flickr account using only a standard-issue Web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox (Figure 1). The process is quick and, provided you know how to find your photos on your computer, it’s no more complicated than opening up a file in any program.
You need to sign into Flickr (www.flickr.com) before you can upload or work with your photos. If you have a Yahoo ID (and who doesn’t?) then you can use the same user name and password. Or you can create a separate account (another Yahoo ID, actually) just for Flickr. Creating a Yahoo ID requires you to provide a screenful of personal profile information, like your birthday and zip code, but not your address or phone number. As a final step, Yahoo sends you an email with instructions for completing the sign up process.
Tip: The confirmation email contains a message that reads, “Click here to review your Marketing Preferences.” Do it. When you get to the Yahoo Account Information page, turn off all the checkboxes under “Special offers and marketing communications from Yahoo!” Yahoo intends to inundate your mailbox with all the newsletters on that list unless you tell it not to.
Each time you sign in, Flickr’s home page greets you with a multicultural welcome. Today it’s Aloha, tomorrow it might be Giorno or Hola. The left side of the window provides general info about Flickr. The right side displays some of your recent pictures and a few related pictures uploaded by other people. (Flickr makes associations between photos by the keywordscalled tagsthat members apply to them.)
Click any of the photos to see a larger version. You also see prominent links with text such as: Your Photos, Your Groups, and Recent Activity. At the top of the list is “Upload photos.”
To upload photos to Flickr with your browser:
- On the Flickr home page, click “Upload photos.”The next screen shows you a list of six blank text boxes, each with a Browse button next to it.
- Click the first Browse button. When the “Choose file” box opens (Figure 1), select a photo file, and then click Open.The filename appears in the first text box. Continue until you’ve got all the shots you want to upload (or you’ve filled up all six boxes).
Figure 1. Follow the “Upload photos” link, and you see Flickr’s upload form with six text boxes. You can upload photos from any location on your computereven a camera attached with a USB cable. Most likely, the photos you want are in your My Documents -> My Pictures folder. (For a refresher on navigating Windows XP.)
- In the text box below the file names, assign tags to help you find and sort the photos later, if you wish.You can click the question mark next to “Add tags for ALL these images” to read a brief explanation of how Flickr’s tags work.
- Select the Private radio button if you want Flickr to reveal these photos only to members you’ve designated as Friends or Family.When you don’t select Private, Flickr automatically selects Public, meaning that anyone who signs into Flickr can view your photos. For example, a visitor may stumble upon them if he searches for any tags that happen to match yours.
- Click Upload.Flicker uploads your photos, and then on the next screen, gives you a chance to type a title, description, and, again, tags for each.
- Fill in the text boxes (you don’t have to), and then click Save.The “Your photos” page displays an image of each photo you’ve uploaded, plus any description, tags, and other settings. You can click the picture to change this information, and view a full-size image, at any time.
You can click Upload at the top of page to add more photos. Or, if you have better things to do than select photos one by one, then try Flickr Uploadr, described next.
2. Installing and Using Flickr Uploadr
If you want to upload dozens of photos at a time, then you probably feel constrained by the upload form’s limit of six photos. In that case, Uploadr is the tool for you. With Uploadr you can send many photos at a time to Flickr using Windows XP and a handy drag-and-drop tool.
To install Uploadr, go to www.flickr.com/tools, and then download the Windows XP installer program. You need to make two decisions during the installation: whether to place a shortcut to the program on your desktop and whether to add a “Send to Flickr” command to your right-click menu. The shortcut question is simply a matter of tasteyour desktop may already be too cluttered with shortcut icons. The right-click menu, though, is a real timesaver. Leave this option turned on, and you can send any photo to Flickr just by clicking on it.
With Uploadr installed, you have two great ways to send photos to your Flickr online library:
- Send photos with Windows’ right-click menu. Right-click a photo file and choose Send to Flickr from the shortcut menu. Uploadr adds the photo to its list of files-waiting-to-be-uploaded. You can continue to add photos to Uploadr, and then send them all at once by clicking the Upload button.
- Send photos with Uploadr’s drag-and-drop tool. You can also drag and drop photo files into Uploadr’s window to add them to the queue. (Dragging and dropping into Uploadr works exactly as in any Windows window.)
3. Emailing Photos to Flickr
As if the Web form, Uploadr tool, and right-click menu command weren’t enough, Flickr lets you email photos to your library, too. To get your special Flickr email address, go to www.flickr.com/tools, and then click the “Upload by email” link at upper-right. The odd-looking email address you see on the next screen is your dedicated address for uploading photos by email. (It probably consists of a combination of words and numbers and ends in @photos.flickr.com.)
On the left side of the “Uploading by email” page is a link that reads, “We can also send you an email to add this address to your address book….” Unless you relish the idea of memorizing your cryptic upload address, click this link. When Flickr’s email arrives, add the sender to your address book. In Outlook, for example, right-click the Sender’s address and choose Add to Contacts from the shortcut menu. From then on, you can upload photos simply by typing Flickr in the “To:” field of a new email message. Enter a title for your photos in the subject line, and, if you wish, type a description for the photos into the body of the email.
Tip: Email is often the easiest way to send photos to Flickr when you’re traveling. If you didn’t make note of the Flickr address before you left, then you can have Flickr assign you a new one. Go back to the “Uploading by email” page, and click the Reset button. Flickr gives you a new email address you can use right away.
