Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Getting Photos Online with Flickr

Flickr is fairly different from the other consumer-oriented online photo sites such as Shutterfly and Snapfish. Part of Yahoo, Flickr caters to a much wider online community than just photography buffs. It’s less interested in selling you prints and other items and more focused on providing a forum where visitors can share photos and other interests. For example, when you log on to the site, you see not only your own photos, you also see a sampling of photos that other Flickr members have recently uploaded. Whatever your passion—whether it’s hiking, baseball, or manhole covers—you’ll find plenty of folks to share photos with on Flickr.

Note

That’s not to say Flickr doesn’t want to sell you things. You’ll get offers to print your photos or put them on postage stamps. In fact, Yahoo would love you to upgrade to a Pro account (about $25 per year), which buys you unlimited storage, ad-free browsing, and the ability to upload more than 20 megabytes of photos each month.

Perhaps because Flickr has so many different types of members submitting photos from computers, cafés, and cellphones around the world, the site gives you at least three ways to upload your pictures: using an online form in any Web browser; via email; or with a free, downloadable drag-and-drop tool called Uploadr. (Evidently Yahoo is saving money on vowels.)

Uploading Photos with Your Browser

You can upload photos to your Flickr account using only a standard-issue Web browser like ...