Intro to Flickr

March 7, 2005 9:37 AM

I am about to set up a Flickr account. Is there anything I need to know before doing this... tips, tricks, or whatever would be very helpful.
posted by bamassippi to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Flickr is really user-friendly. It's not complicated. The only tip I can think of is to make sure you scale your photos down to a smaller size before uploading them, so you don't blow your upload limit with just a couple of huge files. This only applies if you're signing up for the free membership. If you're going Pro, you can upload huge files to your heart's abandon.
posted by bonheur at 9:40 AM on March 7, 2005

Two tips:

1) The option in the upload client to scale down large photos only works on really large photos. For instance, it won't do anything to a 4 megapixel 2MB jpeg.

2) You only get 100 photos total on the free account, in addition to the 10MB/month upload limit.
posted by smackfu at 9:56 AM on March 7, 2005

beware, Flickr is very, very addictive.

You think you spend too much time on the internet now? just you wait ;) it's a great community, there are some outstanding pictures there, and the group collaborations add even more fun. Build a list of Contacts by bookmarking the work of photographers whose photos you admire.

Look at pictures, make some comments on other people's pictures, participate in a group or two. Note: the user interface is still going through a couple of mild changes, so don't get too attached to the photo display format.
posted by seawallrunner at 9:56 AM on March 7, 2005

Tag the hell out of everything, and subscribe to feeds of images with tags that you find interesting.
posted by adampsyche at 10:11 AM on March 7, 2005

You have two "names" in Flickr. You have your screen name which is what everyone sees underneath your picture in your profile and you also have whatever name you want to appear in the URL that goes to your photos. So, while my screen name is jessamyn [and I can change this, within reason] the path to my photos is http://flickr.com/photos/iamthebestartist/ because someone had already taken "jessamyn" for this. You can only pick ONE name for your URL path and it stays with you through the life of your account so choose it wisely. If you see someone with a photo URL that looks like a bunch of gobbledygook, they have likely not chosen a URL pathname yet.

You can subscribe to a feed that is just comments from people who have commented on your photos. You will become addicted to this feed.

You can make someone a contact even if you don't know them. People do this all the time. Making someone your contact does not automatically make you their contact, if you know what I mean. Friends and Family, on the other hand, are more specific identities. You can easily limit who views your photos to friends and/or family so you may want to pay attention early on to who goes in to these categories.

As you get started many if not all of your newbie questions can be answered by reading the three main Flickr forums. In the off chance that you can't get an answer there, in my experience Flickr people really do answer support email fairly promptly.

In my opinion an upgraded "pro" account is totally worth it.
posted by jessamyn at 10:23 AM on March 7, 2005

I'm a relatively new subscriber to Flickr

my two suggestions:
1. Tag your photos like crazy

2. Use bloglines (or something similar) to subscribe to tag/group-pool rss/atom feeds that you enjoy
posted by soplerfo at 11:02 AM on March 7, 2005

lifehacker posts about flickr regularly. I like their tips for flickr beginners list.
posted by whatnot at 11:24 AM on March 7, 2005

To upload, I use a combination of Picasa and Gmail. Picasa will automatically resize the photos prior to uploading, and the intergration with GMail makes it that much easier.

To do this, you just set up to post from e-mail within the Flickr service control panel, and then add Flickr with that address to your gmail address book.
posted by benjh at 12:45 PM on March 7, 2005

Free accounts aren't limited to 100 photos, it's just the "photostream" that's limited to the latest 100. (Possibly photo sets you setup too, not sure.) All your photos stay on the server, they're just not as available once they're older than the last 100.

That 10MB per month upload limit is going to bite, which is why I went Pro.

You can squeeze a little more out of that limit by running your JPEGs through an optimiser. Newer cameras may only see a couple of % saving, older ones can see up to 10%. I use jpegoptim. It doesn't change the quality of the photo, it just redoes that last stage of lossless compression.
posted by krisjohn at 3:22 PM on March 7, 2005

Yeah! Good to see Jessamyn's name here!
One tip - don't be afraid to email someone about what they are using (if it doesn't show) or how a shot happened. I've been on both sides of those questions and have learned quite a bit.
posted by TomSophieIvy at 9:30 PM on March 7, 2005

I'm a Flickr Pro user and I adore the service, but there are some shortcomings -- hopefully things that will be addressed as they move out of beta. The biggest issue is that there is no batch download. It's easy to upload hundreds of pictures at a time to Flickr using one of their uploading tools. However, should you decided you want to download multiple photos, you're stuck doing it one by one by one. This means that at this point, Flickr can't safely be used as an online backup for the photos on your hard drive. It's also a big pain if, say, you get married and people upload hundreds of wedding pictures to Flickr and you have to download them one ... by .... one. Not that I'd know anything about that. ;)

Also: be aware that since they're in beta, they do go down sometimes ... like tonight. :(
posted by arielmeadow at 9:36 PM on March 7, 2005

you've all been helpful... thanks!
posted by bamassippi at 7:20 PM on March 8, 2005