Getting Around Flickr

This is the seventh in a series on Social Media.

Flickr is the the largest of the online photo sharing communities. It boasts 11 million regular members, 30 million monthly visitors, and over 1 billion photos. There are also Flickr groups for almost anything you can imagine.

When you set up your account, uploading images requires only three steps.

1. Choose the images you want to upload.
2. Click the upload button.
3. Give each image a title, a description, and popular tags.

Even easier than that is the "Flickr Uploader," which you can download to your desktop. To upload a photo, just drag and drop it into the icon. In addition to ease of uploading, Flickr gives you great exposure with search engines when you use keywords in your tags, file names, and image descriptions. If you click on an image you will see more information about it, such as tags and descriptions; when you click on a tag, you will see all of the other images on your site with the same tag. That's why it's a good idea to fill in this information as you upload each image. Just as you would develop a marketing strategy for LinkedIn or your Facebook page, you should establish one for Flickr.

Clients and viewers can find you through your images. You can share your photos with the public (who can post comments) or limit them to your friends; you can also keep them private. Fickr allows you to organize and link to your photos, separate them into galleries or sets (collections of related images), and export them into your blog and Website.

Flickr is a powerful tool and well worth the time it takes to explore its many tools.

Is it Mac, or is it me?

It’s not easy being a Mac person. First of all, despite all protestations to the contrary, it’s pretty hard to communicate with the PC world. And let’s face it, the world is PC. Second, every time something goes wrong, the smug PC person on the other end will automatically blame Mac. After all, what else could it be? But it’s the third reason that is driving me to distraction this morning.

Mac is innovative to the point of overwhelm. Every day there seems to be a new product, a new process, a new way to do something that was introduced only two days before. I never seem to catch up. Despite being a loyal member and regular attendee of One to One, Mac’s individualized training program for Mac users (only $99 a year), most of the time, I’m in a fog. Maybe it would be more accurate to call it a cloud, because that is actually the newest Mac creation.

When I signed up for a program called MobileMe (only $99 a year), my trainer, in a rush of words, informed me of all its wonderful features: another e-mail address; syncing capabilities with my other Mac (which has the old version of MobileMe, called .Mac); the ability to share large files and photos through my public folder; and, best of all, “the cloud.” The cloud is where I would back up all my important files that can then be downloaded to either of my computers. Here’s something no one mentioned: When I change a file on one Mac, it will automatically sync with the other one. That took a near nervous breakdown on my part to figure out.

MobileMe has many wonderful features I haven’t yet discovered. If I had actually followed my Mac trainer’s explanation of how to find all the interesting help topics on the MobileMe website it would have speeded up the learning curve, I’m sure.

“I showed you that,” he said. “You did?” I replied, suspecting early dementia. He was politely adamant; I was embarrassed. I remember him going over something I didn’t quite get, and the MobileMe videos and mini-manuals must have been what it was.

So, here I sit, enmeshed in MobileMe icons, MobileMe videos, and notes from my last MobileMe training session, trying to figure out which icon will take me where I want to go and how to password protect my public folder. If you know, please give me a hint. I would so appreciate it!