What’s the best way to use Flickr?
October 14, 2006 pm31 7:30 pm
I set up an account a few months ago, but uploaded nothing.
Now WordPress tells me I am at my limit for uploading to WordPress (mostly, I suspect, because I uploaded some massive photos for the Van Cortlandt Park South and Nine Photos of Salonika posts back in August. Live and learn, but too lazy to reformat.)
So, Flickr is really a new world for me. Hints, tips? Any interesting ways to use it? Things to avoid? Public vs private?
Can you use Flickr to share family photos? Without showing them to the whole world?
I am starting at zero here. I’ll go do some reading, but anything you can fill in in the meantime would be greatly appreciated.
JD2718 
Flickr is excellent, but best if your friends and family also use it. You can mark photos as being visible only to friends, only to family, or public, or completely private. You can also create public and private groups. There are applications that make uploading, tagging, and organizing into sets easier: http://www.flickr.com/tools/
Integrating flickr with your blog is an interesting thing to do as well. There are several ways to do it, but I think wordpress.com has its own mechanism: http://flickr.com/photos/94632485@N00/59368625/
The list goes on, but I will also mention geotagging as a cool feature. You can drag your photos on to a map, and it will save the GPS information with them. Details here: http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2006/08/great_shot_wher.html
The friends & family visibility is nice, as mentioned. If you set your pictures to private, nobody else can see them in general, though apparently there are ways of making them visible in other Flickr groups, and possibly other ways as well. But it’s as private as you make it; there’s nothing to fear. If you don’t want people stumbling upon your pics, but you want them visible to those who know they’re there, you can exclude them from public searches by clicking on the appropriate link on the bottom of the right sidebar.
A dead-easy way of including a Flickr picture in your blog is to click on “All sizes” on the top, or “View different sizes” on the right, which (surprise!) lets you choose one of several resized versions of your picture, and gives you the HTML code to cut and paste to your blog to display the picture as well as link it to your photostream.
You can add your picture to groups, and share them with other people interested in the same things as your pictures feature.
And on and on… Flickr is really great!
oh yes, there are outside applications such as Quickr Pickr (http://www.quickrpickr.com/) and fd’s Flickr toys (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/)… have fun!
mrc and sarai, thanks for the advice. I will spend some time this weekend to explore Flickr. I really need to get the photo stuff down if I am serious about expanding my outdoor staircase pages.
Oh, and what would Picasa (sp?) do for me?
Sorry, can’t help you there. I don’t use it, myself, & am not familiar with it. Might be worth playing with, though, if you’ve got some spare time and could benefit from photo organization.
Picasa is for organizing your photos on your computer if you have a PC. (Sorta like iPhoto does if you have a Mac.) Google also now has Picasa Web Albums, which lets you upload your photos from Picasa to share on a web site. For me flickr is superior in a few ways: cost/storage space, social networking, and tagging.
Here are two in-depth comparisons with different conclusions:
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/06/flickr-vs-picasa-web-albums-no-tags.html
http://firsttube.com/read.php/1155088951/review:_picasaweb_vs._flickr.html
well, i don’t have any tips to add as them seem to have been covered, but i just wanted to add that i use flickr and i love it!