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Flickr is one of the best photo organizing tools out there. It allows you to quickly upload your photos, set them up in an easy-to-locate manner and then share them with others. You’ve probably used the site before to browse online pictures or to check out a friend’s photo album.
So why don’t you have a Flickr account yet? The answer is most likely that you’re a busy person who just hasn’t taken the time to figure out how to set up an account. What you should know is that setting up a Flickr account is a simple process that doesn’t have to take very much time at all. Following you’ll find all of the information that you need to get your account started and to begin enjoying the site’s advanced features.
The basics of setting up your Flickr account
The first part of setting up your Flickr account is going to be easy. It’s essentially just a process of going to the Flickr website and filling out some simple information, just like you did when you opened your email account. In fact, if you happen to already have a Yahoo! account, you hardly need to do anything at all to get going on Flickr. It’s a basic process of creating a user profile (name, location, icon) and beginning to upload your photos.
Most people who are starting out on Flickr will upload their photos one at a time. However, the savvy Flickr user knows that it makes a lot more sense to speed things up by adding your photos in bulk. There are five ways that you can upload photos in Flickr including the use of the Flickr upload page and send-to-Flickr features like email and mobile phone messages. However, the best method is to make use of the Bulk Uploader tool. You download the tool and then use it to upload your photos by dragging all of the photos to the tool and choosing to upload them. You can add a simple title, description and tags in order to identify your photos later.
Flickr Tags One of the reasons that Flickr is so great for organizing your photos is that you can add tags to each photo (or bulk set of photos) so that you can easily find what you’re looking for later. For example, let’s say that you took a bunch of photos during Christmas at a family gathering and then later that same day when you were out with friends. You could label all of the photos with a “Christmas” tag and then add “family” to some photos and “friends” to other photos.
Flickr Sets and Collections
These same types of tags might be useful when you begin to organize your Flickr Sets and Collections. These are basically online photo albums that let you keep different groups of photos together. Sets are a group of photos; collections are a group of sets. So you might have a set of “Christmas” photos and then a collection of “Holiday” photos which includes the “Christmas” images.
You might be thinking that it sounds time-consuming to have to organize and label all of your photos, sets and tags. But, of course, Flickr has found an easy and efficient way of doing that. It’s called the Organizr tool. Within this tool, you can select entire groups of photos and then easily apply tags or change descriptions to the entire set or collection. The instructions on the tool are easy to follow so it doesn’t take any time at all to learn it.
Privacy Settings
One of the things that you’re probably going to want to learn right away is how to make sure that you know which people on the Internet can see your photos. It’s an easy thing to do if you pay attention to the “privacy settings” on your photos. You can select for each photo (or set of photos) to be viewed by only you or by everyone on Flickr. You can also choose to allow certain groups of people to see your photos, such as your friends or your family. (See sharing below.)
The one thing on Flickr that confuses people in this area is that there are also several other things that you can choose on your Flickr photos that are similar to privacy settings but aren’t the same thing. The one that is most confusing is the “safety level”. You can add this so that people viewing your photos can see only the level of image that meets their own comfort levels. You can also choose to label the type of content in the photo and to license your work so it’s safe from copyright violations by others.
Licensing Your Work
Many people want to be able to show their photos to the world while still protecting themselves from having everyone use those photos. The best way to do this with Flickr is to use Creative Commons licenses on your Flickr photos. Through the Creative Commons website, you can easily choose from a set of different licenses that you want to use to protect your photos. For example, you may opt to let people on the site reprint your photo as long as they credit your for it; Creative Commons calls this an “attribution” license. Alternatively, you may say that it’s fine for people to use your work but that they can’t alter it in any way; this is called a “no derivative works” license. The licenses that you select will be displayed on your Flickr photo page so that people know what rights you’ve retained to your own photos. It’s an easy way to make sure that if your photos get used around the Internet, people will know where they came from.
Share Your Photos
The primary purpose of Flickr is to allow you to organize your personal photos in a place where you can always access them from any place that has an Internet connection. However, a major secondary purpose of Flickr is to be able to share your photos with others. You may wish to invite your friends and family to view your photos; for example, you might want to share images from a family reunion with everyone who came. Alternatively, you may wish to share photos with strangers who are interested in the same type of photos; for example, you may wish to meet other people who take photos of their pets like you do.
To share photos in this way, you’ll want to set up or join groups on Flickr. You can create a private group where all of the people at that reunion can post their photos for everyone else there to see. You can create or join a public group where all of those pet photo lovers can share and discuss their pictures. Using the privacy settings that you learned about when first setting up your Flickr account, you’ll be able to share public photos with anyone that you like while keeping your private photos separate.
In addition to using groups, you can also use very basic Flickr tools that are based on simply adding contacts one at a time. This is similar to what you do on social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. The difference is that when you add a contact, you can also add the contact to your group (such as “family”) so that sharing is even easier.
One feature that many people love on Flickr is that you can allow others in your groups to add tags to your photos. This shows off the collaborative side of the site. It uses a community effort to more accurately organize photos and lets people easily share comments about photos with one another. For example, let’s say that one of your family photos is tagged “Uncle Ed”; someone in the family might see that and let you know that it’s actually “Uncle Joe” in the photo. They can change it themselves or notify you so you can change it, depending on the levels of sharing you’ve established on the site. Creating these settings are all easy because the Flickr interface uses basic tools that you’re already used to using online.
Map Photo Locations
We’re increasingly seeing mapping features used online for different purposes. If this interests you, it’s something that you can do on Flickr with your photos. Using the same Organizr tool that you are already familiar with, you can drag and drop your photos onto a world map that reveals the location where they were taken. So all of those photos that you took of New York when your family met there for the reunion can be dragged and dropped onto the New York part of the map. This way, others who are interested in New York photos can easily find your images. Additionally, you can easily find your own photos if you remember the location where they were taken. It’s just another step in getting your photos even more organized.
Upgrading your Flickr Account
Flickr is a great service that offers you a lot of photo storage and image organizing tools for free. However, there are certain limitations of the site. You’re limited to only a certain number of uploads and sets per month on your free account. You also have to deal with a minimal amount of advertising on the free Flickr site. If you’re not too keen on being restricted in this way, you might find that you’d like to upgrade to Flickr Pro. You pay about $25 for the year and get unlimited uploads and sets, video upload tools and ad-free use of the account.
photo credit: William Hook
