Newbie's guide to Flickr

Want your grandma to start using Flickr but don't feel like explaining it to her? This handy guide will have her tagging photos with 'Lasertag Sake-bombs' before you can shake a stick at your beer.

Flickr is a popular photo sharing and hosting service with advanced and powerful features. It supports an active and engaged community where people share and explore each other's photos. You can share and host hundreds of your own pictures on Flickr without paying a cent. There's also a pro service that gets you unlimited storage and sharing for about AU$2.50 a month, making it one of the cheapest hosting sites around (more on that later).

Flickr was created by a small Canadian development team in 2002 before being acquired by Yahoo a year later. Many other photo sites (including Yahoo Photos) are easier to use, but none offer Flickr's interesting features or its cohesive community of enthusiasts.

If you have the Flickr uploader installed, you can upload any picture with a right click.

Adding your photos to Flickr

First step: Get your photos into the service. Flickr has a few options to get photos from your camera into your account, the easiest one being a little uploader app you can install on your PC or Mac (there's also a Linux version.) When it's installed on a PC, you can right click on any photo and send it straight to Flickr. You can also use this uploader to create albums (Flickr calls albums 'sets') for your pictures. You can also install software that lets you publish from any folder in Windows XP, without the need to use the uploading program. If you're using a Mac, there's also a plug-in for iPhoto.

If you're not keen on downloading a piece of software, Flickr lets you upload six individual photos at a time. This might work for some weekend shots, but if you've got more than 20 shots it's worth trying out the batch uploader. We recommend using the downloader software, or if you've got Yahoo's Widgets Engine installed, the latest version comes with a widget that doubles as a photo viewer and uploading tool.

Continue reading to learn how to tag and organise photos, add notes, geo-tag, create albums, whether or not you need premium membership, and our list of Flickr users worth checking out.

Add tags to easily search and sort through photos.

Newbie basics: tagging and organising. Once your photos have been uploaded, you don't need to rely on titles or folders to sort them, as you do with most other sharing sites. Instead you use tags: short identifiers that you can later use to categorise and search for photos. Sorting by tags lets you create sets on the fly -- of just your pictures, or yours plus the community's. People often tag pictures with names, locations, event descriptions, and theme. For example: "Mountain", "Everest", "Cold", "Vacation."

There are several ways to tag pictures, either one at a time or in batches. On any given picture click the 'add a tag' option on the right hand side. Flickr lets you add up to 75 tags to each picture, so feel free to go wild. If you have a multi-word tag like "Tree House" put quotations around it, otherwise it will get split into two different tags.

Advanced Tagging Tidbit: To tag multiple photos you can use Flickr's batch editor. Go to a set (album), click the Edit button then Batch operations>Batch edit>Add tags.

Notes let you add captions for specific areas of a photo. Users won't see a note until they mouse over it.

Notes. Say there's a really cool part of a picture you want people to notice. The easiest way to do this is with notes. On any of your pictures click the 'add note' button above the photo. This pops up a rectangle you can move around the picture and adjust in size. Just like a Post-It note, you can write a quick message for others to read. Once you're done, click save. The cool thing about notes is that they don't get in the way if viewers don't want them. To see them, users can just move their cursor over a picture to pull them up. You can have several different notes on the same picture, and other users can add notes to your pictures. Good note etiquette: keep notes user-friendly by not overlapping them.

Geo-Tagging. Geo-tagging is a special method of tagging photos with their location. To geo tag any photo just click 'Place this photo on a map' under the 'additional information' box on the right hand side of your photograph. This will pull up a new interface with a large map.

Sets on top, collections on bottom. Collections are just groups of sets, clumped together.

The easiest way to add the location is to type it into the search box in the top right hand corner. The built-in search isn't as forgiving as your average search engine, so if you can't remember the address, try looking it up on Google and pasting it in. Once you've found your spot, just drag your photo from the bottom of the screen to where the map pointer is. After doing this to several of your photos from different parts of the world, check out Mappr, which will give you a visual representation of where your photos were taken on a large map.

Sets. There are a few ways to create a set, the easiest is clicking the "add to set" button on top of any photo. Flickr will show you a drop down list of any other sets you've created, along with an option on the top that lets you create a new set. Give it a name and a description and you're done.

If you want to add multiple photos to a set, click the organise button on the top menu on any page on Flickr, then select "Your sets and collections." Pick whatever set you want to add your photos to, or make a new one. All your photos reside on the bottom of the screen, so scroll around to find the ones you want and just drag and drop them in the large area above. When you're done, just click save.

One thing to note about sets -- as a free member you can only have up to three, whereas pro members have unlimited. We go into more detail about free vs. pro a little later.

Collections. Flickr introduced this feature recently, and it allows users to put several sets together into one group. This would come in handy if you went on vacation, as you could create individual sets for each location, and then group them together as a collection.