Pixiq

It’s important, when sharing your photos with anyone, to use a site that is comfortable to you. In the past I’ve hosted my own website and also shared photos on various other social media websites. There are, of course, a slew of hosting options as well as media sharing avenues one could explore. I happen to now host my images on Flickr. It’s easy and I have little concerns over their intentions for my images. I’m able to make great contacts with wonderful artists as well as get great feedback and wonderful insight into the world of photography. I’m constantly amazed at the images produced by “amateurs” on Flickr.

My favorite use of Flickr, however, is the ability to use it as a blogging tool. I have a photoblog for projects and I can dump my images onto Flickr then easily blog straight to my wordpress site. But also, you’ve noticed that I use Flickr to upload images to this blog as well. It allows me to use other peoples works as a visual example to either showcase a wonderful piece of work I’ve stumbled upon or as an example of a particular photography tip. Using Flickr in this way allows the original photographer to be properly credited for his or her work and acts as a link back to their Flickr site. It’s important that we remember to give credit where credit is due.

Using Flickr as a blogging tool has helped simplify my work-flow because the first place I post one of my images is at my Flickr site.

Here’s how you set it all up:

Upload Images to Flickr

If you already have a Flickr account then you know how easy this step is. You can do it straight to your site using the default upload images page, or head over to the tools page to get uploaders specific to your taste. I use the Flickr uploader for Mac and it’s fast.

Set Blog Preferences

Here you need to set up your Flickr account to “speak” with your blog. You’ll have to allow Flickr access to your blog and authenticate that you are in fact the owner of the blog. Once that is set up you simply choose a default layout that works best for your particular blog. For this blog I use a layout that allows text to be more predominate than the image because this blog is a tutorial about photography. For my photoblog, however, I use the largest image with the text underneath because that blog is about the images. You should be able to determine pretty easily which layout works best for your blog.

Send Flickr Image to your Blog

Once you are all set up you can start blogging. When logged in to Flickr click on the image you want to blog and hit the “blog this” button above said image. From here you can title that particular blog entry, add a body of text, and send it to your blog. Done!

Photograph World of flickr by msc-web.de

So my question to you is; How do you Flickr?