You’ve had a digital camera for a long time, and you’re savvy enough to experiment with your digital photos online. You’ve got a Flickr account or a Zooomr account, and you’ve been sharing your photos with distant friends and family for quite some time. Mom and Dad have no trouble using the web these days, so they can easily peruse your photos to see what you’ve been up to.
Last year, your parents got digital cameras as a gift, and they’ve really enjoyed the savings compared to film-based cameras. You can just take the camera’s memory card to Walmart (or wherever) to print out only the pictures that you want to keep.
Well that’s great, but there’s a problem. Mom and Dad, wouldn’t it be nice if you could share your photos with your friends and family just like your kids do? How do we do that, anyway? Here it is, plain and simple.
We’re going to use Flickr and not some other service. Why? Here are a few reasons:
- Flickr is free for the first couple hundred photos. If you want to keep more photos online at once, or upload more photos every month, then you’ll need to pay a small yearly fee.
- Flickr does not use any crazy cutting edge registration process. Zooomr might be free, but neither Mom nor Dad have a blog already, and even if they do, they probably don’t have OpenID.
- Flickr is run by Yahoo. Yahoo has been around forever, and so your photos aren’t likely to vanish from the web like they might from some other as-yet-unproven service.
- Flickr is pretty easy!
The first thing you’ll need to do is register for a Flickr account. Here are the steps:
- Visit the Flickr home page in your browser.
- Click the “Sign Up” button (shown in the image above).
- On the “Sign into Yahoo” page, click “Sign Up”. (Or you can log in, if you already have a Yahoo user ID — jump to step #6.)
- Fill out the information requested on the signup form. Here are some tips:
- Preferred content: Lets you pick the country and language that best suits you. If you’re in the US, use “Yahoo! U.S.”, the default.
- Yahoo! ID: This is the user name you’ll use for Yahoo and Flickr. You need to pick something that nobody else has picked, and it will make you pick until you do. Use the button underneath to test whether your selected ID was already taken.
- Yahoo! Mail: If you check this, Yahoo will create a new email account for you. You don’t need to use it. If you don’t check this, you’ll need to provide your own email, which Yahoo will use to send you more junk mail. Probably.
- When your Yahoo registration is accepted, you’ll see a confirmation page. Click “Continue to Yahoo! Flickr”.
- You will need to select a screen name for your Flickr account. This is your name as it will appear in flickr. Pick something, then click “Sign In”
- You should see a page that tells you that you’re all set. You are ready to put pictures into your Flickr account!
The “all set” page has a link to upload photos, and says that it’s the best place to get started. Perhaps this is good for your first photo, but it is not the best way to upload your photos in the future. My suggestion is to go ahead and click that link and see how easy it is to use Flickr, and then I’ll explain the best method for uploading in the future.
On the Upload page, click the “Browse…” button next to one of the boxes, and then find a photo that you want to share on your own computer. When you have selected a photo (or more than one, if you use the other boxes), you can click “Upload” to send the photos to Flickr.
You’ll notice a few pages go by as your photo is uploaded and processed by the Flickr system. When this is complete, you’ll see a page that lets you edit the title of the photo and add a description.
Whenever you want to see your photos, look at the top of a Flickr page for the menu bar. It says “Home You Organize Contacts Groups Explore”. Click on “You” to see your photos.
You’ll notice that uploading photos seems to take a long time. There are many technical reasons for this that I won’t get into. But one obstacle you can remove to make uploading faster is uploading more than 5 photos at once. You do this with the Flickr Uploadr application.
The Flickr tools page gives you quite a few options for uploading photos. Check them out if you’re interested. The one I like best is the Uploadr. Find the one that works with your computer, download and install it.
When you first run the Uploadr, you will need to register it with your Flickr account. This is so that your photos are uploaded into your account and not someone else’s. There is also a component of this process that requires you to give permission to the Uploadr to access your Flickr account. This is safe to do, and you can’t upload files with the Uploadr unless you activate it.
When the Uploadr is running, use the green plus button to select photos that you want to upload. You can also drag photos from your computer onto the Uploadr to queue them for uploading.
While photos are in the Uploadr window, you can select them by clicking on them. Use the red minus button to remove a photo from the upload queue. You can also rotate the selected photos using the rotation buttons.
When you have queued all of the photos you want to upload, click the Upload button. On the page that appears, you can add “tags” (keywords that help you find the photos later) to the photos, or put the photos into a new or existing “set” (a group of photos with a specific topic). You can also mark photos as private or public, depending on your preferences. When you click the Finish button, the Uploadr will begin to upload your photos. This will still take a while, but you don’t have to do it in 5-photo batches.
When the uploading is complete, the Uploadr will ask you what you want to do next. You will have the option of viewing the photos you uploaded on the Flickr web site. There, you can edit the photo titles and descriptions.
To share your uploaded photos with others, click on the “You” link in the main navigation toolbar to see your photos. The URL that appears in the address bar (usually it’s something like http://www.flickr.com/photos/82774504@N00/ when you first sign up, but there are ways to change this) is what you want to share with your friends and family. With that URL, they can access all of the photos you have uploaded. That URL will work for as long as you have your Flickr account.
There are many more features of Flickr that are very handy. Adding contacts will allow you to upload private photos that only people you’ve selected can see. It will also make it easy to get a quick glance of all of the newest photos your contacts have taken. The Explore section of the site is great for fun and neat if you want some photographic inspiration.
With these instructions, you should be able to share your photos on Flickr pretty easily!
