Easy PC Tips

So, you’ve just bought yourself a new digital camera, and you’ve been busily snapping away to your hearts content since you’re free of those expensive film and developing costs, and you’ve just taken 423 pictures of your dog at the park and you’re itching to share them with your friends and relatives all over the world.

What do you do?

Do you email them to everyone and hope they don’t mind sitting, waiting for 25 minutes while two of your high resolution dogy piccies show up in their mailbox over a sloooow modem link? Not ideal. If this problem sounds familiar, read on…

The problem

Digital cameras are within the reach of a huge number of people. Long gone are the days of their expensive price tags. For a small amount of money, you can buy a very decent camera that takes quality shots. Memory storage cards are so cheap too, and so it makes sense sense to set your camera so that it takes the highest quality shots at the highest resolution - you never know just when you are gonna take that one photo which would look nice blown up as a large print for Grandma - you’ll be really glad of that extra resolution. Watch out David Bailey!

The pictures you take though, while great quality and very detailed, are going to be VERY big. Big files take a long time to send across the Internet even on high speed connections. Sure, you can tweak the images to reduce their size and then send them out to all your friends, but sending the photos out by email is fast becoming a thing of the past. Mailbox restrictions, attachment size limitation and the perhaps the lack of appropriate viewing software on the recipients computer can often make it an inconvenient way of sharing your snaps - but its the only way many people know…right?

The solution

Wouldn’t it be great if you could put your pictures up online somewhere? Perhaps on a web page, all of your own, where your friends can visit at their leisure to check out your latest pictures and perhaps browse an archive of all your old ones?

Yahoo’s online photo sharing service, Flickr fills this gap, and once again, it’s free and very easy to use.

Yes, Flickr is a free service. So why not give it a try. You’ve got nothing to lose and so much to gain.

What does Flickr offer?

Flickr offers a free service and a paid service. Here’s a list of what they both include:

The free account offers:

• 20 MB monthly upload limit - this is the quantity of images you can upload
• 3 photosets - these are your albums, so you can group your snaps into logical collections of like fotos
• Photostream views limited to the 200 most recent images - a photostream is like a slideshow
  
• Storage of smaller (resized) images

If this isn’t enough, you can pay for a ‘PRO’ Flickr account, for US$24.95 a year, which gives you access to a lot more of the above:

• 2 GB monthly upload limit
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited photosets
• Permanent archiving of high-resolution original images
• The ability to replace a photo
• Ad-free browsing and sharing

Visit flickr.com to sign up and get started. It’s fairly straightforward to do, so I won’t cover the registration process here…

OK, I’m all set up and have a Flickr account…now what?

Once you have your Flickr account set up, its time to start adding your precious pics. Login in and look for the ‘Upload photos’ link. This takes you to a page where you can browse your computer and pick the photos you’d like to start putting in your online album.

Click the “Browse” button and search for the pictures you like to upload and keep picking photos until you’ve filled all the slots in the list or chosen just the pics you’re interested in.

Tagging

Now you have an opportunity to ‘tag’ your chosen group of images. Tagging is the process of assigning keywords to your photos. For example, maybe you went on vacation with your family to Bondi Beach and built sandcastles with your nephew, Billy. You might choose to tag the photos with : ” vacation Bondi Beach sandcastles Billy ” .

Tagging comes in useful when you, or your friends want to search your album for particular shots. In this case, a keyword search on say, “vacation” would result in these photos showing up. Similarly, any other pictures you might have previously tagged with “vacation” would also show up in the search results.

Tagging is becoming increasingly popular on lots of other online services like del.icio.us, and technorati and it will pay to get used to the concept. Tagging helps you find your stuff, quickly and easily using words that make sense to you.

Public or Private?

OK. Once you’ve added your tags, you get to choose who you want to allow to see your photos. Most people choose “public” which is the default option, meaning everyone with access to the Internet can see them. However, if you find having all your happy snaps online in plain view for all the world to see, then there are also options to make your pics “private” allowing only friends, or family members to see them (you set this up in the Contacts area of Flickr).

Uploading

Now you’ve set the privacy level, you’re almost done. Click “Upload” and sit back. This could take a little while, especially if you havea lot of large photos or are on a slow internet connection or both. Flickr keeps you updated on its progress so you should be able to gauge how long it will probably take.

Once the upload process is complete, you get an opportunity to add a little more info about your images:

• Title - Give your pic a more meaningful title - IMG456342.JPG doesn’t mean much to most normal people!
• Description - Describe the photo in your own words. You’ve got a lot of space here, so go to town!
• Tags - Make a few last minute adjustments to your tags. “Hmmm, Billy wasn’t in that one…”

That’s it. All finished. Your images are uploaded, named and and ready for viewing…

Note: As you find your feet, and begin to get the hang of things you’ll probably find the upload process a little long winded, in which case take a look at some of the upload tools you can download and run on your PC.

Sharing your photos with everyone

Now you have your pics in your online album, you need to share them. Flickr gives you a unique website address that you can give out, for people to take a look at your shots.

It’ll be something like:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/accountnameyouchose

From there your visitors can browse variously sized versions of your snaps, watch a photostream (slideshow) and maybe download a few of your shots for printing.

It’s a wrap

So, that’s that. I hope you now have a basic, but much clearer, ‘picture’ (no pun intended) of what Flickr is and how it can help you with your picture sharing dilemma. It’s a great application and lot of fun. Flickr has LOTS more features than we’ve covered here, so for more details go straight to the source at www.flickr.com to sign up and get started.

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