Share your photos with Flickr

Step-by-step guide to managing your photos with Flickr

1 Organise your photos with Flickr

www.flickr.com/photos/organize

With the free version of Flickr you can organise your photos into a maximum of three groups, or 'sets' as they're known on the Flickr website. You can add captions to your pictures, write descriptions, tag people, and even annotate them to draw attention to points of interest.

To do this click on a thumbnail once. Click Add note above the photo. Place cursor on the box and hold down the left mouse button, drag into position and expand the box by dragging out one of the corners and add your note. You can also do the same to other people's photos if they allow this.

The map feature is useful if your photo collection spans numerous locations, as you can drag and drop pictures to the country or area where they were taken. Click Organize and drag the photos you want to add into the centre of the screen, then click the Map tab.

2 Share your photos with Flickr

www.flickr.com/groups

There's a real community feel about Flickr, and the best way to get involved is to join groups that share your interests. 

There are some weird and wonderful groups on the site, ranging from people sharing photos of red things to French bulldog owners showing off their pets. Some groups are devoted to photos of particular products, for example Panasonic's Lumix G1 camera Flickr group.

Once you've joined a group you can post your own photos and contribute to forums. 

These public groups are open to anyone, but if you want to set up a group that's a bit more exclusive then there's the private group option. 

This is ideal for special occasions like weddings or birthdays where friends and families can pool together photos from the same event.

3 Upload your photos to Flickr

www.flickr.com/upload

As soon as you've registered, you can start transferring your photos from your computer on to the website – a process known as uploading. This involves selecting the pictures you want to upload one by one. 

You can speed up this process by using 'Uploadr', an uploading tool provided by Flickr (for either PC or Mac) that will allow you to publish a group of photos directly from your computer. 

And some web browser add-ons can make it easier to upload photos to sites such as Flickr – see the Which? guide to downloading and installing Firefox add-ons to find out more.

Once you've got your photos online they will appear as thumbnails (see right), which you can then click on to view larger versions. 

You're not obliged to share them with the rest of the world. You can choose who has access to them by selecting Only You, Friends, Family or Anyone.

From the Contacts tab you can invite people to register with Flickr so that they can look at your photos and hopefully start to share their own.

Upgrading to a Pro Flickr account

Free Flickr accounts do have limitations, however, so if you're planning to use Flickr to upload large amounts of photos you may be better off using another photosharing website, or paying to upgrade to a 'Pro' Flickr account. 

A free Flickr account limits each user to 100MB of photo uploads per month, a maximum file size of 10MB, a maximum of three sets of photos. In addition, only the latest 200 of your photos are shown, and are resized to fit on the screen, though all your photos are still saved on Flickr's servers in their original resolution.