Using Flickr to expand your web presence

The #1 photo sharing website is Flickr (or it was the last time i looked anyway) but its not just for professional photographers and teenage kids uploading camera pics of themselves sticking their tongues out. Flickr is a large on-line community and is an excellent way to expand your web presence into social media, that first tentative step perhaps.

Images uploaded to Flickr can be searchable by anyone using the site or third-party tools/search engines so if you have some interesting product photographs or examples of artwork putting them on Flickr is likely to gain you extra eyeballs. Though don't forget to tag the images and geotag as well if you can.

Embedding and linking back

But its not just "interesting photographs", a web site i am involved with uses Flickr to host news images (usually a collection of suits grinning at the camera). These images are then embedded back in the web site's news article. The Flickr image is also given a summary paragraph from the news article and a link to the article (and also any other links to relevant areas on the site).

Its a relatively painless way of expanding your web presence, potentially free as well though i heartily recommend buying a Flickr Pro account (no i am not on their payroll!) Although the number of visitors to the site who have come there from Flickr is not that great (less than 1% according to Google Analytics) every little helps.

Badges

If you have uploaded plenty of images to Flickr and organised them into sets then you can add badges to your website displaying these images as you see fit, perhaps the latest images uploaded or a random selection which is changed every time the page is loaded. Its a very easy way to add this kind of random image display without having to code it yourself, if you are in a restricted environment or have the relevant modules installed in a CMS.

Once logged into Flickr click the "tools" link at the bottom and then the badge link on the right hand side of the tools page (for some reason they make it not that straightforward to find) then you can build your badge bit by bit selecting your content set, which images to display and then how these images are displayed. You are finally given some HTML code which you can then copy and paste into your web page or blog, like i have done here with a badge from my own Flickr account.

www.flickr.com

The badge uses tables and this can go a bit wonky when you put it into a web site or blog that uses CSS but it usually doesn't break completely!