Gallery: Share photos online with Flickr

To use the free Flickr photo-sharing service, it’s first necessary to set up an account with Yahoo (which owns Flickr). This isn’t as onerous as it sounds and only takes a minute or two. Go to the main page at www.flickr.com and click the Sign Up link to start the process – then return to the main Flickr page and type in your Yahoo ID and password. Then, click the Sign In button to continue.

The easiest way to get photos onto Flickr is to use Uploadr, a small, free program. Click the ‘tools’ link on the main page and then select the Windows version on the subsequent page. Download the program to the Windows Desktop (ignoring any security warnings on the way) and then double-click the download file to install it. Follow the prompts and accept all of the defaults (unless there’s a specific reason for doing otherwise) and then double-click the new icon to start the program itself. To begin uploading photos, click the large Add button.

In the dialogue box that opens, navigate to the folder where the photos are stored. It’s possible to add them individually, but it’s faster to hold down the Ctrl key and press A to highlight them all, and then click Open so that all the photos are loaded into Flickr Uploadr at once. When they’re in place, they can be re-ordered by clicking and dragging with the pointer. Here for example, the first photo is being moved to the end of the sequence.

Before uploading the photos, it’s advisable to give them titles and tags (descriptive words) so that they’re easier for other people to find – even if they’re only intended to be seen by friends and family. Click on each photo in turn and then type the relevant details into the empty boxes on the right. If it’s appropriate to give them all the same title and tags, press Ctrl and A to highlight them all and then you can enter the information just once. For now, leave the other settings as they are and click the Upload photos button.

The photos will then be uploaded to Flickr – the time this takes varies depending on how many photos there are, their size and the speed of the internet connection. Free Flickr accounts allow you to upload 100MB of photos each month. When the upload finishes, click the Go to Flickr button and then scroll to the bottom of the web page and click the Save This Batch button. The main photos page will then be displayed.

Currently, all the photos we’ve uploaded are set as ‘public’ which means that anyone – even non-Flickr members – can see them. However, viewing can be restricted so that individual snaps or sets of photos can only be seen by friends and family (though the downside of this is that they too will need to become Flickr members). Beneath each of the photos shown on the screen there is an option to edit the privacy settings – let’s go ahead and do that by clicking a Change link under one photo.

This opens a new page that includes various privacy settings. Here for example, we’ve changed the ‘public’ setting (which allows anyone to view the photos) to ‘friends’ and ‘family’ by clicking the radio button next to the Only You option and then adding ticks to the Your Friends and Your Family options by clicking there with the left mouse button. Click the Save button and this photo will become ‘invisible’ to the general public. We’ll tell people about our photos in a minute.

Back at the main photo page, the picture’s settings will have changed – while all the other photos are public, the first photo now says that ‘Only friends and family can see this’; so we’d better tell them about it. Slide the mouse pointer up to the Contacts menu and click the arrow there to open the dropdown list. Click Invite your Friends. At the next screen, type in the email addresses of a friend or family member, tick the box next to ‘This person is a friend’ or ‘This person is family’ and then click the Send button at the bottom.

Flickr then sends an email inviting the addressee to sign up so they can see the photos. They click the link in the invitation message and then go from there. Once they’ve joined and signed in, Flickr sends us a message saying they’ve arrived, and then directs them to our friends-and-family-only photos. If they see one they like they can click on it to open the picture, then click the All Sizes button at the top and then click the ‘Download the Large size’ link and use it as Windows wallpaper.

After a month or two of Flickr use, it’s sometimes a good idea to introduce a bit of order into your photo library by arranging pictures into sets. Here for example, we’ve got a selection of sunsets. We’re going to start by clicking on the Organize button at the top. This displays all the photos we’ve uploaded so far in a strip at the bottom. To start creating a set, drag the relevant photos from there and into the main window.

Continue dragging and dropping photos from the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen into the main window and then click the downward arrow next to the ‘Add to set’ button and choose New set. When the dialogue box opens on the left of the screen, type in a name for the set – in this example we’re calling it Sunset – and then click the Save button to continue. New sets appear at the side of the main photo list.

Visitors to Flickr can use the Search box on the front page to find photos, either by typing in something vague – like ‘sunset’ – or by being more specific. ‘Sunset’ for example, returns nearly 3million results, so having tried that it’s probably a good idea to click on the Advanced Search link and narrow things down. Here for example, we’ve clicked the Tags radio button and typed in ‘sunset’ and then ‘Devil’s Dyke’.

This returns only those pictures that have been tagged by the photographer with the word ‘sunset’ and the phrase ‘Devil’s Dyke’ – which, as luck would have it, are the very tags we used when we uploaded this set of photos. From this page visitors can click on various links to see more of our photos, or pictures from other people that share the same tags. In order to give people the best chance of finding photos, it’s important to tag them as comprehensively as possible.

Finally, Flickr has become an influential port of call for people looking to buy a new digital camera, thanks to a relatively new feature that lets visitors search for photographs taken by particular kinds of cameras. Click the Search by Camera link next to the Search box. Flickr shows the most popular brands, but has many more in the dropdown list. Here we’re displaying a selection of photos taken with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX10.

Finally, Flickr has become an influential port of call for people looking to buy a new digital camera, thanks to a relatively new feature that lets visitors search for photographs taken by particular kinds of cameras. Click the Search by Camera link next to the Search box. Flickr shows the most popular brands, but has many more in the dropdown list. Here we’re displaying a selection of photos taken with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX10.