Getting More In Depth With Flickr.com

Now let's get into the fun stuff, uploading your first photo. Click on the “upload photos” link on your home page. The first step is to choose the digital photo(s) that you want to upload. Click on "choose photos" and navigate to wherever you have stored the photographs on your computer. Just choose one photo for now, you can add the rest later. After choosing which photo you’d like to upload, you can then set the privacy of your photo. You can choose to make it available to the public, which means anyone on Flickr can see it, or you can choose to make it private, which means that only you can see the photos. You can also set the photo so only friends and family on Flickr can see the photo.

When you’ve decided on your privacy settings, you can now click the large button in pink that says “upload photos and videos”. When Flickr has finished, you’ll see a green check mark next to each photo, as well as one at the bottom that tells you the photos are uploaded to the server. Now we’re going to add a description to the photos so that when people look, they know what they’re looking at. Click on “add a description, perhaps?”

You have a few options to add a description to your photo here. You can add tags, a title, add the photo to a specific set, and write a description. We’ll start with the title. You can name the photo something simple like “Bob’s Sunset” or something more to your liking. After you’ve got the title, you need a description. Was the photo taken in a specific city? Were there certain camera settings you used? If there’s a person in the photo, what is their name? Anything that teaches someone more about your photo goes in the description box. Now we need tags. Tags are one or two words that would help someone searching for your photo to find it. If you’ve worked with tags before, Flickr tags are a bit different. You don’t need to add commas between each tag, just a space. If you add commas, it’s going to show up as one long tag and you don’t want that! Add descriptive words such as the city, main colors in the photo, what camera you used, any prominent objects in the photo, anything that would help someone find that photo. If you need to use more than one word, put it in quotation marks. For example: “yellow flower” or “purple dragon.”

Now we can add this photo to a set. On the top right there is a blue link that says “Create a new Set.” Go ahead and click on that. You can now name your new set. Call it whatever you want. “My Dog Jojo” or “Flowers.” When you’ve thought of a good title, you can give that set a description. What photos will be in this set? Will the set only include photos of birds, or will it include all the photos of your friend Nancy? It’s a good idea to name the set after the photo you just uploaded so it has somewhere to go. Now that you’ve created the set, you can add this photo to it. Now click “save.” Your page now has its first photo on it, along with the set you just created on the right-hand side. Later, you can go back and add more photos using this same process.