How to Get Photos into Flickr

Flickr is woderful for many reasons:
1. You can show photo albums publicly, meaning that your friends don't have to log into one of five major photo sharing sites. Or, you can mark them private, and then your friends would need to log in again.

2. You can organize the photos by albums, or "sets" and let people see what albums you have right away.

3. If you have a website, you can go to town on different ways to share photos, and include links back to relevant pages of your website from the photo's description.

But how the heck to you get your photos off of your computer and into Flickr? Here's how:

How to Post (aka Upload) Photos to Flickr:
Login using your username and password. Yahoo bought Flickr, so it may be that your Yahoo address, if you have one, is the same.

Look for the words Upload Photos. If you arrive on the Home page, these will be large and blue. All of your tools for Flickr are at the bottom of the page as text links.

Follow the Steps.
1. Choose Photos
2. Upload Photos
3. Add Titles and Descriptions to a Set. You can "Add More" if you like, which is a link at the bottom of the box you'll see after you choose your photos. You can choose many photos at once by holding down your CTRL key as you select them with your mouse.

When you're ready to upload, make sure they are clicked as Public. This is the default, so it most likely will be selected. If you want to password protect them, aka not share them with the world, click Private.

When they upload, you'll see "Finished!" Click to add a title and description. These are super important, because they help people find your type of picture when they are search through Flickr.

These next steps are important, if you are interested in getting wide exposure for your photos:
Add Tags: Tags are words or phrases that have to do with the picture. For phrases, you'll need to include " " around it, to show that the word is really a 3-word phrase. For example: trip to paris would be "trip to paris". Then, include other phrases that have to do with the picture. If it's a product, include the product name, company name, color (that can be popular), type, animal name, etc. People's names, etc. Start paying attention to other tags, so that you can include things like "paris fashions" if that is a popular tag. But you want to be relevant, so as not to disappoint someone who is expecting something. You can always add or delete tags at any time when you are logged in.

Add Title: The default is the image file name, most likley IMG_341, which is no fun. Call it "Vintage 1994 Wedding Dresses from Channel". You can be long, it's up to you.

Add Description: Self explanatory. However, if you have a website, you can link to it here if it's appropriate. "See more website designs at www.mywebsite.com"

Add to a Set: Sets are organized photos, like "30th Birthday Trip" or "Thanksgiving"

You should be all done with uploading and naming your photos! Now create some sets if you want another way to display your photos in an organized way.

Creating a Set:
For extra fun, you could create a set so that people could view like photos at once. Here's how to do it:
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Organize in the "You" category.
At the top of the screen, click the Sets tab.
Look to the right, and in gray type (hard to see) click "Create new set"
Follow the directions, but basically, drag your photos into the little box on the left. This will fling them into the big gray box.
Name your set.
Click save.

That should be it!