Organizing Photos with Flickr
You’ve uploaded your photos to Flickr and now its time to get organized. On your Flickr home page (www.flickr.com), you see a few of your photos and others under the heading: “Everyone’s photos.” In the upper-left corner are some links to other pages:
- Home. Flickr’s home page is a no-nonsense, bare bones screen with big, clear links to the pages where the real business takes place: uploading photos, and viewing photos (yours or everyone else’s). When Flickr has any news or announcements to tell you about, you’ll read it here first.
- Tags. In Flickr, these keywords or phrases are your primary tool for both organizing and searching for photos. But they’re much more than that. In Flickr’s lively online community, tags are a basic unit of currency. Most members add several tags to each photo they upload, hoping to see and be seen by folks all over the world with similar interests. On the Tags page, Flickr displays current lists of the most popular tags for the past 24 hours, past week, and all-time favorite tags.
- Groups, People, Invite. These pages connect you to Flickr groups, your friends, and your family for sharing your photos. The invite page makes it easy to lure your pals to Flickr; fill out a simple form and Flickr sends them an email.
The next line down shows more links, including “Photos: Yours”. Clicking it transports you to your personal page, where you organize your Flickr photos. Your photos are shown in the center running one at a time down the page (Figure 1). In Flickr, your entire collection of photos is called your photo stream.
On the “Your photos” page, you see thumbnails and information about each image. Click any photo to see a larger version. A button indicates whether the photo is private or public. You can change this setting by clicking on the button. If your photo is public, then you may see that it’s received a number of comments. To see the comments, click the link.
On the right side of the page are links that let you upload photos, create photo sets (Flickr’s version of the “album” feature in most programs), and edit your Flickr profile. Once you create sets (as described in the next section), you see them listed at left.
1. Creating a New Photo Set
Flickr has its own unique nomenclature (in addition to an aversion to E’s). While other services store your photos in albums, Flickr stores them in photo sets. When you add photos to a special interest group, you’re adding photos to the pool. In any case, you can rearrange your photos within a set. If you’re using the set for a slideshow, for example, then they’ll be in sequence.
Flickr has a few ways to create a new set. Here’s the quickest: On the “Your photos” page, click a photo that’ll go into your new set. Above the large image, click “Add to Set” (Figure 1). When the drop-down menu appears, click “create a new set.” This same menu is also a great way to add photos to existing sets, since it lists them all.
Figure 1. As you explore the “Your photos” page you’ll notice that instead of providing options for cropping your photos and eliminating red eye, Flickr gives you tools to Send to Group, Add to Set, and Blog This. These features reflect the fact that Flickr’s reason for being is rooted in the Yahoo community rather than printing photos.
Next: Browsing and Searching Your Photos by Tag
