How To Take Full Advantage Of Your Flickr Account – Part 1

Flickr is one of the today’s most popular photo sharing sites. Whether you’re a professional who wants visibility and honest feedback on your work, or an enthusiast who just wants your photos to be seen and enjoyed, Flickr is a great place to share your images and engage in discussions about them in a non-commercial setting.

Despite its popularity, the finer points of using Flickr to its full potential and bringing visibility to your images can be illusive. This is the first of a two part walkthrough that explains how to take full advantage of your Flickr account.

With a free Flickr account, you can upload two videos and 100MB worth of photos each calendar month. You can also organize your photos into three photosets and post them in up to 10 groups.

For $25 per year, you get a Pro Account, with unlimited photo uploads (20MB per photo), unlimited video uploads (90 seconds max), unlimited bandwidth and storage, unlimited photosets, archiving of high-resolution original images and the ability to replace a photo. You can also post your photos in up to 60 group pools and view your count and referrer statistics. You’re also able to browse and share ad-free.

The Basics
After you sign up, there are some housekeeping decisions about your account you should get out of the way, so you don’t have to think about them later.

Under the “You” menu, select “Your Account”. On that page, the two sections you need to take care of first are under “edit who can see what” and “if it’s searchable”. Change the options as necessary.

In the “Your Flickr web addresses” section, set the name you want to use. This is the URL you will be sending to your viewers so they can see your images. If you don’t set it, then your URL will have your actual Flickr user ID , which can be hard to remember, such as 24392742@N06. Think carefully about this, as cannot be changed once you set it!

Then go back to “Your Account” again and click on the “Privacy & Permissions” link. Set the options to suit your comfort level.

Set any other options you like in “Your Account” and “Your Profile” (under the “You” menu). When you’re done, click on “Home”. You are now ready to upload images to your Flickr account.

Uploading Images
To upload images, click on “Upload Photos” on the home page. Then click on “Choose photos and videos”. Navigate to the location of your photos and select the ones you want to upload. You can select several at once if you like.

When you have selected your files, you can set the privacy options for those images, such as whether they’re visible only to friends and/or family, or to the public.

After they have been uploaded, you are presented with the option to enter titles, descriptions and tags. Set those to your liking and click on “Save”. To help bring attention to your photos, take the time to create clear, meaningful titles, write good descriptions and tag your images carefully, so that the search engines can find them more efficiently (SEO). Voila! You now have images in your Photostream.

At this point, you can select “Organize” in the menu bar to put your images in Sets, or you can create Collections of Sets if you have several you want to keep together.

Linking To Your Images
You can obtain a static link to your photo by clicking on All Sizes above the image. This brings you to a page where you can select the size of the image you want to display or download. Copy and paste the URL corresponding to your choice. You’re also given a block of embed code you can use in a website or a blog, with a link back to the photo’s page.

Note that the Flickr Community Guidelines specify that if you post a Flickr photo on an external website, the photo must link back to its photo page, so even if you grab the individual link rather than the embed code, it’s up to you to make sure it points back to the source.

Slideshows
Your Photostream can be viewed as a slideshow by pressing the “Slideshow” link at the top right of your page. Any set you create can be viewed that way as well.

If you mouse over your slideshow while it’s running, you’ll see a menu of options across the top. One of those is the Share option, which gives you a link to the show that you can give to people, and embed code you can use to incorporate the slideshow into your website or blog.

If you haven’t already opened a Flickr account, go ahead and give it a try. Set your privacy options as described above, upload some photos and have some fun. In the next post, we’ll cover adding Contacts, Faves, Comments, Groups and Explore.

Tagged as: flickr, photo sharing, social media, social networking