Welcome to the introduction of Flickr series. Flickr gives you an easy way to store your photos online and share them with friends, family and even the world. You can also explore the Flickr community and see other photos people are sharing. Flickr has a free basic account which we’ll cover in this series but for those of you who like advance features as well as the ability to store your videos, there’s also a pro-account for small fee.
To get started using Flickr, click on Create an Account. If you already have a Yahoo account, you can sign in using your username and password for that account. If you don’t have a Yahoo account, you can easily create one by filling up this short form and clicking on Create an Account. Then just use your username and password to sign in to your brand new Flickr account and you can begin to create your profile, upload your photos and find your friends on Flickr. I’ll go over how to do more with your Flickr account over the course of this series.
After you’ve created your Flickr account which I covered in the first episode in this series, you want to personalize it with your own touch. You can choose a photo from your computer to use as your buddy icon. Your buddy icon is what represents you when people are viewing your Flickr profile. You can use a default image provided here or choose your own. Click on choosing image from your computer, click browse and select an image form your computer, then click on upload. Your buddy icon is small so take the box, drag it over the area you want to use and resize it as needed. Then click on make the icon. Next, you can create a custom URL that people can use to access your public Flickr profile and photos. This can’t be changed later so make sure you pick one you like. It also needs to be original so if the one you like is taken just choose another. Last, you can personalize your profile with information about yourself that you want to share with the Flickr community. You don’t need to enter anything you don’t want here so just share what you like.
Flickr is a photo storage and sharing site so let’s get right into uploading your first photo to your Flickr account. Click on upload your first photos to Flickr then choose photos, select one photo or you can hold down the control key if you use a PC or the command key if you use a Mac and select multiple photos. Next, select the privacy levels for your photos, you can make them completely private and only visible to you, like invisible to friends, family or the public then click on Upload and then add a description.
Now, you can add titles to your photos, descriptions and add tags. Tags are keywords or descriptive words about your photos and makes them easier to find when people are searching for specific topic. Do this for all of your photos and click Save. These photos are now in what’s called your photo stream. In the fourth episode in this series, I’ll go over how you can create sets for your photos to organize them even more.
Creating sets for your photos allows you to organize them in to groups and helps when you have a lot of photos in your photo stream. Click on your sets and then go to your organizer, this is really easy; just drag the photos that you want included in to the set on to the empty canvass. Now, you can name your set and give it a description. If you have a lot of photos in your photo stream then you can search for ones to add to what’s here. You can rearrange the photos in to the order you like by dragging and dropping them into place or you can choose to have them arranged by date, alphabetically, randomly, or the reverse order. You can also edit things like titles, descriptions and privacy levels for photos in an entire set at once by doing a batch edit. When you’re all done click on Save and your set will be stored here in your sets. You can create many different sets for all of your photos and then view them each separately.
This is your Flickr photo stream, over here on the right we’ll see your sets and on the left your most recently uploaded photos. You can completely change the layout of your photo stream to something you like. You can choose to show small images only, small images in to your sets, medium images only or medium images in your sets. I’ll choose small images in my sets. You can also create a contact list to make sharing your photos with friends that much easier. You can invite people to your Flickr profile by entering in your e-mail and name and choose up their friends or family. This helps setting privacy levels. You want to learn more about setting privacy levels, check out the third episode in this series. You can then enter in an invitation and click send.
Another way to add a contact is to search for friends who may already be using Flickr. You can have Flickr search to your contact list in your Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail accounts or you can search for someone already using Flickr. I choose to search for people in my Hotmail account and it shows that these contacts are already using Flickr. Now, I can choose to add them as a contact, a friend, a family member or both or not to add them at all. Click on add contacts when you’re done. You can also create groups on Flickr and join preexisting groups. Let’s say you really love photos of Hawaii, just do a search for Hawaii and here are some groups with lots of photos that have to do with Hawaii. You can then to join the group.
If you like you can create your own group too. Decide if you want to allow everyone to join, have it the invite only or private. Then just name it, add a description and choose if its age appropriate for everyone or only those who over 18, you then just need to setup how your page should look and name the administrators. Now, your group has been created and you can customize the rules, the group information and the members how you see fit.
One of the great things about Flickr beside storing and sharing your own photos is the ability to view and comment on other photos being shared by the Flickr community. To search for a photo, just enter in what you are looking for here, I’ll search for a sunset. You have the option at searching through photos from all of Flickr, the photos of your contacts, your friends and so on. I’ll search their photos from all of Flickr. Here are photos that match my term sunset. You can view the most relevant results, most recent or most interesting. When you see a photo that you like, you can click on it to view it in a user’s photo stream and add it to your favorites so you can view it again and again. You can also send it to a friend via e-mail. If you scroll down, you'll see the photos description as well as any comments other Flickr users have left.
At the bottom of the page, you can comment on the photo as well. You can also invite the photo to be posted in one of your groups. To learn more about groups on Flickr, check out the fifth episode in the series. If you click on a user’s name, you can view their photo stream and all of the photo sets they’ve created and made public. You can also choose to view their photos in a slideshow format. If you take pictures with your mobile phone and have a Flickr account, you can send photos to your Flickr account right from your mobile phone. You can also send photos to your Flickr account right from your e-mail.
To use Flickr from your mobile phone, visit the Help section. Here, you’ll find tips and tricks on how to upload photos from your mobile phone to Flickr. There’re even different tools and applications you can download for your specific phone. If you get stocked, there’s an entire Help section to get you started. If e-mailing is your thing, then you can e-mail your photos to this unique e-mail address either from your phone or from an e-mail service that you currently use. You can add tags here that will always be used when sending photos to this e-mail address. You can use a subject line to create a title for your photos and the body of the e-mail to describe your photo.
If you have a blog or website, you can create an HTML or flash badge that will display your latest photos or even just your favorite photos from Flickr. You can choose the content; it can be all of your photos or photos tag with a specific key word. It can also be photos from a group or everyone’s photos. Next, choose up what you would like your buddy icon and screen name at the bottom of the photos, how many items you’d like to show and which photos you’ve like to show. You can also choose the size and decide id you want them laid out, vertically, horizontally or if you like to customize it yourself. Then just pick the colors of your badge and here’s what it will look like. Now all you need to do is copy the code and paste it on to the part of your site where you want to add it.
Flickr offers different types of licensing that you can apply to your photos that you choose to share the Flickr community. There are different levels depending on how to much credit you want for the photos that you take. Go to the creative comments area of Flickr. Here you’ll see different photos added with different types of creative comments licensing.
Let me briefly describe each one, an attributions license means that you will allow others to copy, distribute, display and even create works based on your image as long as you’re giving credit for the original work. Non-commercial means that you’ll allow other people to copy distribute and display your work but only for non-commercial purposes. No derivative means that people can copy, display and distribute your work but may not create any work based on your property. Share alike means that you’ll allow others to create derivative works based on your property but only under a license that is the same as how you license your work. You can add creative comments licensing to your work and even choose a default setting for all of your work or change the creative comment licensing on a batch here.
On your Flickr homepage you’ll see tabs up at the top that can take you to different parts of the site. The home tab will take you to the Flickr homepage where we are now. If you click on the drop sown arrow next to the U tab you’ll see that you can access our photo stream, your sets, your archives, your tags and your map. I’ll go over your map I the tenth episode in the series. You can also access your favorites and if you have a pro-account in your stocks. This is also where you’ll see your recent activity, upload photos, view your account, your profile and access your Flickr mail. The organize tab will take you to all of your content, your most recent uploads, your photo sets and your map. The context tab is where you can find your friends most recent uploads, your contact list, do a search and invite your friends. The groups tab is where you can access your groups, seeing the changes made to your groups and search for groups. The explore tab is full of ways to find different and exciting content on Flickr. For example, you can view the last seven days of interesting photos from all of Flickr, a calendar with random Flickr photos, and you can also access the Flickr blog.
In your photo stream you can also access your popular photos, your favorites, your archives, your tags and your sets. When you’re organizing your photos, you have the ability to add them to a map to show where they’re taken and share them with friends. Go to the organizer and then click on map, choose how you want to be able to view this map. Use these controls to zoom in and you can drag the map on for better focus. You’ll want to zoom in pretty close to get the photo in just the right spot, and then drag the photo on to the spot where it was taken. You can also save the map and name it so you can find it again easy later and that’s it.
Besides adding photos to the map, you can also view a world map with photos that have been uploaded to Flickr from all around the world. You can search the map for specific topics and a location like rainforest in Hawaii then just click on the bubbles to view the images. You can also create a link to this map and share it with friends. Adding your photos to a map is a really great way to remember exactly where you were when you took a photo and viewing the world map is a fun way to see the world through other people’s eyes.
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