Should I Flickr? I think I shall!

 It seems that everyone (and their mother) is using Flickr these days, and I must admit, I had never tried it.  After reading quite a few posts by Thomas Hawk who seems to love his Flickr, I decided to give it a shot and document the process.  If you don’t feel like reading all the way down, I will say right off the bat – I’m a convert!

 

You can see the step-by-step photos of me getting going with flickr.  I actually timed the entire process, which took a grand total of 10:15 to get a batch of photos uploaded, tagged, and active on my flickr site!

The first three pictures show the steps to get a flickr account set up.  I already use a yahoo account (mostly because my.yahoo.com is great), so according to my timer it took a grand total of 15 seconds to get activated.

 

Next, I uploaded 3 pictures from my 3GSM coverage, just to try out the manual upload process.  This took another minute, after which I was prompted to create titles, descriptions, and most importantly, tag the pictures.

 

1:30 later and I was done with these first pictures.  Not too shabby!

The next step was uploading the next 50 or so photos I had left, so I downloaded the Flickr Uploader tool.  The download took less than a minute (yes, I was really timing every single step of the process.  I felt that if it took me more than 15 minutes to get going with it, I couldn’t recommend it to people like my dad who still has better luck with his disposable camera than the Canon SD450 he just bought last month) and once installed took another 20 seconds to authenticate with my online flickr account.  MUCH better than when I tried Picasa/Hello several months back!

 

 

 

I dragged and dropped the whole folder and clicked to start the upload.  A total of 90 files (9.86MB) uploaded in 5:15 (I have a 384K upstream DSL connection), then flickr gave me the option to begin editing their titles and descriptions immediately.  One really nice touch of the uploader is the ability to tag the entire set at a time.

And that was it. 10:15 total time had expired, I had 58 pictures (I deleted a few for those who are counting) uploaded and tagged.  I did spend another 10 minutes adding titles and descriptions, which was fairly painless.  I couldn’t find any “raw editing” tools, so the process to organize was restricted to the built-in tools (which aren’t bad at all), which made it a little tricky to find the pictures I wanted to delete.

I’ve since added a flickr widget to the site (look on the left column), invited several friends and family members, and posted a few personal pictures as well.  Very slick, very smooth, very easy to use.  Whether your a digital photo novice (dad, you are reading, right?) or a prosumer/technogeek kind of guy/gal, I have to recommend flickr to anyone who wants a easy yet powerful tool for organizing and sharing digital pictures online.

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Now, if you happen to run a blog, here are the extra steps it takes to set Flickr up with your blog.  No exaggeration, this took an additional 2 minutes total, including my test post.    

Step 1: select your blogging tool

Step 2: enter your administrator username and password

Step 3: authenticate

Step 4: test

 

I highly recommend trying out flickr, it’s easy to use, and highly addictive.  Congrats to the flickr guys for getting acquired to Yahoo! I’m a little late to the game on this one, but apparently there’s some controversy emerging about new corporate policies.

Here’s a link to my Flickr photostream.