Docs » Getting Started » Hints and Tips
Resize your photos before you upload them
Flickr limits the amount of bandwidth you are allowed for uploading images, so if you upload images straight from your camera you are severely limiting the number of photos you can upload each month.
Instead, resize your images in your favourite editor before uploading them. How you do this will depend on the editor you are using, but be careful not to overwrite the original image: you might want it at full size later on!
If you're resizing from a very large image try to do it in 50% chunks. For example: if your image is 2000 pixels wide, resize it to 1000px, then 500px, rather than straight to 500px.
Always, always, always sharpen your photos afterwards, using the advice below, because resizing degrades an image and you'll want to fix that before you upload.
Sharpening your resized photos
There hasn't been much talk about sharpening photos on Flickr's forums (fora?) so here is a quick run-down on what you should do to improve the final quality of your image after resizing it.
Because the resizing process always degrades an image a little we need to use a filter to rectify this. In Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and Fireworks this is called the Unsharp mask.
Having resized your image find the Unsharp mask in your menus and select it. The settings to use are much discussed in pro-photography circles (look here for example!) but I find that 150%, 0.5 (radius) and 4 (threshold) work well in most circumstances. Click OK and admire the results.
Sharing your photos
You might find, at some stage, that you would like to provide a thumbnail of one of your photos that you have posted to Flickr. This can be especially useful if you would like to share one of your photos in a group discussion for example.
To do this, you need to first access the different sizes of your photos and so then the image urls.
You find the different sizes of a particular photo by going to its individual page then following the "View different Sizes" link just under the title. Here, you are helpfully presented with a sub-page if you like for each size of that particular photo (commonly thumbnail, small, medium, large and original).
On each sub-page there is a link to the image url and a helpful snippet of HTML to copy and paste that will include the image of that particular size wherever you paste the code with the image as a hyperlink back to the individual photo page. Cool huh!Read the weblog
We find that the Flickr Blog is an excellent way of keeping up to date with exciting developments in Flickrland. It's also a great way to find new and brilliant photos, found by the devs themselves.
If you've really got time to spare then there is also Flickrzen, an unofficial weblog run by a fellow Flickr lover. He posts the best images he comes across. The guy has good taste, it's well worth a look.