Something Fun For You on Flickr

I (Katie) will admit that I’m a total flickr fanatic. I love it. A LOT!  I wrote an article last year on 20 Reasons Why You Should Be On Flickr if you are interested in learning more about all the ins and outs of what the site has to offer. Today, I want to show you how to quickly get started on flickr, and introduce an exciting new group on flickr called Digital Scrapbook Inspirations. This is a flickr community group and gallery for our fabulous Daily Digi readers and we can’t wait to see what YOU have to share with us!

If you want to join in the fun, you will need to have a flickr account and a basic understanding of how flickr works. Here are some quick tips to get you started:

FIVE FAST FLICKR TIPS

1. Yahoo owns flickr, so you will need a Yahoo account ID to create a flickr account. Chances are if you have been online for awhile, you might already have created one, but if not you will be prompted to do so when you sign up for flickr. Just follow the instructions on the home page at http://www.flickr.com/ to create your account. You will automatically be signed up for a Yahoo email account, but you don’t have to use it for anything if you don’t want to. I just changed the settings in my Yahoo account to have all mail sent to my existing email account. I never log in to my Yahoo email at all. Of course, you can use the email account if you need one.
2. Take the official flickr tour so you get a feel for what the site is all about. You will want to take a few minutes and set up your profile with a picture and a few details. You will want to decide if you want a free account or a pro account (or you can always upgrade to pro later). I would suggest a pro account because then you will have access to the full resolution files of all your images without any limits. Why is this important? Well, it’s like having a FULL online backup of all your photos and layouts at FULL resolution. I don’t know of any other site that offers that for only $24.95 a year! How do you access the full resolution files? It’s easy! . All you have to do is go to the photo on flickr and choose “all sizes” then select “download original size” and it is like you pulled the photo off of your hard drive or a cd. Perfect for when you are away from home or if you don’t want to carry thousands of photos with you at all times. I find it a lot easier to find one of my photos on flickr, then searching through years of archived photo files.
3. Customize your account and privacy settings to meet your needs. With each and every upload, you can control who sees your images. You can keep them all private, available only to selected family and friends, or share them with the entire flickr universe! You also can control the copyright allowed on your images. You can also control what size of image others can download from your photostream. All of this can be edited at anytime by going to your account settings page.
4. Make contacts and/or join groups if you want to connect with others on flickr. You can be as involved as you want to. You can mark someone as a contact and they may or may not return the favor, there is no rule for reciprocation. I would suggest having a least a few contacts so your home page is a little more fun. Your contacts photos will automatically show up on your home page. It’s also great to add family and/or friends who will want copies of your photos to your contact list. I used to have to burn several discs a year to share photos with my family, now they can just grab the ones they want off of my flickr photostream. Better for the environment and a lot less work for me!
5. Upload photos and/or layouts to your flickr photostream. It’s no fun if you don’t use it!

HOW TO UPLOAD PHOTOS AND LAYOUTS TO FLICKR

There are uploading tools you can use, or you can even upload by email, but I like to just use the standard uploader found on the flickr homepage.

Just go to the file that contains the images you want to upload. To select multiple images at once, hold down the shift key as you click on each one. There is no need to resize images before uploading. In fact, you want to upload the full size resolution so you can access them from your own account as an online backup.

You can set the privacy for the photos you are uploading. I chose “public”. I plan to share the layouts with  Digital Scrapbooking Inspiration group. You actually can add private photos to a group – If you share a photo that you marked as private with a group you are a member of, it’s as if other group members have full access to that photo. They can add comments, notes, and tags. The photo isn’t displayed for people who aren’t members of the group.

The next screen will take you to an area where you can edit tags, titles, and descriptions for each image. This is the place where you will want to add layout credits or details about the photo. If all the images being uploaded are going to the same set (like an album), you can designate that here. These won’t be since I’m uploading a photo and 2 layouts that are not related. You can also use the organizer to do these same steps at any time, and the organizer tool is a great way to move images around to different sets. Tagging is a great way to organize your photos so you can find something quickly by using the search box. I can find a photo in seconds on flickr because of the tags I have added while uploading.

Once your image is uploaded it will have it’s own page on flickr where you access several options. The top menu is where you can find the full size resolution by clicking “all sizes”. This is also the place where you can send an image to a group. Once you have joined a group, just select the drop down menu of “send to group” and pick where you want to send it. It’s that easy! You can also do this from the organizer screen as well.

Now that I have added my layouts to the Digital Scrapbooking Inspiration pool, all members of that group can see my pages and I can see theirs. This is fun because you can comment on each other’s pages (if you want to – not a requirement). I love it because you can mark your favorites and have your very own inspiration file!  Here’s one of Steph’s layouts that I just love:

I just click on “add to faves” and it’s saved in my favorites file. You can find your favorites by using the top drop down menu under “YOU”

Here are a few of my recent favorites:

…

Now that’s just a small sampling of  the fun you can have on flickr! I get most of my online inspiration from flickr these days and I love having my pictures stored safely online in case anything ever happened to my physical backups. I hope you will join us in our new Digital Scrapbooking Inspiration group. We would love to be inspired by YOU!