A Pro Flickr Account is a Good Idea to Enhance Your Blog Posts

May 8th, 2008 · 4 Comments

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Many of you are already have a Flickr account. Did you know you can use your Flickr account to enhance your blog or website?

saguaro bloom With a Pro account for $25 a year you can have unlimited uploads and unlimited sets of images. It is easy to upload and manage images and once they are uploaded you can easily organize those images into sets.

There is a slide show option for showing images in a set. When you click that option the set opens a new window with large images for viewing. It displays a URL to the slide show. (I would recommend you upload images at least 1024 X 768) The free account will size them down to this if they are large.

Large Images for your Blog Post

This is a really cool feature for blog posts.

Take photos of local attraction (building, park, event, listing, issue, etc.)
Upload the photos to flickr]
Create a set for those images
Write your blog post
Include an image and a link to the slide show of the set

This provides you a way to get really large images on a blog post without sacrificing bandwidth or load time from your own hosting.

It makes your posts more interesting by providing detailed images of the topic.

Here is a quick example of how this works

Cactus in Bloom

All over the Sonoran desert cactus of different size color and varieties are in bloom this spring. They bring a special kind of color to the desert. This image is a pair of buckhorn cholla taken late in the evening. To see more images of cactus in bloom click the flower or the link to: Sonoran Cactus in Bloom.

If you want to try this out you can get a free flickr account. The free account only allows 3 sets to be created, but that’s enough to get you started and test it out.

Bonus Gem: Create your flickr account name something like TucsonAZRealEstate. It appears in the URL for your images.

The only downside to this: Your images aren’t indexed by Google linked to your site. If this is something you don’t want to give up and bandwidth and load times are not an issue there is a way to do it and still not slow down the load time for the blog or post.

You don’t need a flickr account and all the images in the group will be indexed.

I’ll show you how to accomplish this in another post.

4 responses so far ↓

1 Terry Smith // May 9, 2008 at 7:54 am

WOW! Dave - the clarity in the closeups are fantastic - Good info about the flickr sets, I do like the image links, I get a lot of referrals from them, can’t wait for the next post. Do you shoot all your photos with Nikon D 300?
2 Dave Smith // May 9, 2008 at 8:07 am

Terry,

I shot with the D40 from May to December last year then got the D300 the same week it came out.

The D300 is always at my side. The D40 is a great camera, small in the hands and I really got the feel for DSLR shooting with it. But the D300 12 megapixels really lets me get the quality of image I want.

I shoot RAW and post process with Capture NX.

When I shoot listings I snap on the Nikon 12-24 mm lens and it makes a perfect partnership for shooting interiors.
3 Ismail Shihadi // May 13, 2008 at 12:47 am

Im guessing that lab isnt getting much google image traffic ??
I know that its not a reliable source but i get %25 of my traffic from google images so this wont really work for me

thanks anyway
4 Dave Smith // May 13, 2008 at 6:57 am

Ismail,

We get about the same 25% you do. We have fewer images here at the Lab. I have only used the flickr account approach a couple of times.

If you have a quick post to get going it is simple and fast. If you don’t self host or have the ability to FTP your image files it makes sense to use Flickr as an alternative.

I FTP, self host, and like the image traffic, but the lightbox code is a pain and and there are no slide show thumbs in lightbox.

Real Estate Blog Lab

A Laboratory For Real Estate Blogging