How to... make the most of Flickr

By DAVID PHELAN
Updated:

Flickr

Flickr is a simple and safe storage facility for digital images and videos

Digital cameras are wonderful things, but how many of us leave the photos languishing on our cameras or computers, where they're vulnerable to theft, fire or hard drive failure? Instead, upload them to Flickr, a simple-to-use website that lets you safely store images and videos. 

First, transfer the images from your camera to your computer by connecting the two with the USB cable that comes with your camera.

Mac users have the excellent iPhoto program, which will copy the images to the hard drive. With a PC, Windows will recognise that the camera is connected and offer to copy your pictures to a suitable program, or let you open the folder containing your photographic files and drag them on to the computer desktop manually. 

Then you need to create a Flickr account. To do this, you'll need a Yahoo email account (Yahoo owns Flickr). As soon as you log in to flickr.com, you're guided on how to set up a Yahoo account.

Once this is done, you can start uploading photographs from your computer to Flickr. A Pro account costs £18 per year and allows you to upload unlimited photos; a free account has a limit of 100MB per month, though there is no limit to the total number of images you can store.

If you're using a mobile phone, you'll usually see an option to upload a photo  -  simply set Flickr as the upload destination.

Once uploaded, you can share your photos with far-flung friends, organise them into albums and even turn them into framed prints, posters and more.

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