Using Flickr to Post Photos to Your Blogs

by Heather Alvis 18.December 2007 16:56

I want to encourage all of you bloggers to think about opening a flickr account for your photos.  Flickr is owned by Yahoo, and you will have to create an account, but the rewards are worth it.  You will notice that if you upload photos directly from your digital camera, the images are humongous..usually.  We have some styles set in place on Mindfly-built websites, so the sizes are not absurd, but by using flickr, you will have cleaner posts, and it will be easier for people to use your blog.  

1. You can upload multiple photos at once, and you can create "sets" of photos and "albums" of "sets". 
2. You can set the program to keep all of your images "private" if you don't want the public to have access. You can set others to "public" if you want.
3. You can add people to friends and family if you don't want the photos public, but you want others to be able to see them (they must have an account though)
4. You can organize all your photos and view them from anywhere.
5. You can add captions to your images and to your sets.
6. Flickr automatically saves your images in 7 sizes, and it gives you html for a link to the photos (This is where the blog comes in). 
   
   1. Write your blog entry
   2. Open the HTML view of theblog (2nd tool from left in toolbar), which pops a pop-up window with HTML code in it.  You will be pasting HTML at the end of this code, so place your cursor at the very end, or between 2 paragraphs.
   3. Open Flickr in a new window.
      
   4. Create an account and upload a few photos
   5. Click on "See Different Sizes"  under "Additional Information"
   6. Click on "medium" or "small"
   7. Copy the link text under the photo in Flickr (Control + "A" will "select all), and past it into the HTML view of your blog.  So this instead of uploading a photo, and it will put the photo there in the size you requested.  This is how Rusty adds his photos to his blog.  If your photos look distorted or pixellated, you won't have that problem anymore if you use this method.   Here is an example of the HTML :
      
      1. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/heatheralvis/1695994038/" title="Hallway by Heather Alvis, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2176/1695994038_b0c562eda9.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="Hallway" /></a>
7. Click "publish" on your blog, and see if it works.