Creating Web Pages For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Making a Photo Page with Flickr

In This Chapter

• Great things about Flickr

• Flaws in Flickr

• Uploading a photo

• Modifying photos

• Flickr futures

Photo sharing is one of the greatest uses of the Web. Flickr is the most popular photo‐sharing Web site around, largely because it's so easy to use.

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” the old saying goes, and the right picture can convey information or evoke feelings in a way that may take many thousands of words to accomplish.

But photos have a mixed track record on the Web. Scanning in a printed photo was a hassle. But an even bigger problem was that photos tended to be big (many megabytes in size), and therefore slow to upload to a site and slow to download when someone wanted to see a Web page with a photo. (See Chapter 12 for more.)

But now most of those problems are getting solved by the steady march of technology. More and more people have mobile phones that take pictures and digital cameras. These pictures don't need to be scanned in — and they're automatically compressed, using the JPEG standard, to about 100KB or so. A 100KB photo is just a tenth of a megabyte in size, and is therefore much quicker to upload and download.

The other technological advance is the increasing number of people who have broadband Web access. Broadband is a catchall name for all sorts of faster access, usually at least 1 megabyte per second. At this speed, you can get ten typical JPEG photos uploaded to your Web site — or downloaded to your screen — in ...