I have been blogging for a while and now want to take the next step and actually include images in my weblog entries. The problem is, my weblog host doesnât offer image hosting. A friend told me I should use Flickr to host my images, but I donât see how that works. Can you help me out? Thanks.
The old saw that a picture being worth a thousand words holds just as true with blog entries as it does with books and presentations to bored colleagues, so itâs a smart addition youâll be making to your weblog. But actually including the images can be a bit tricky because, as you note, they need to live somewhere on a server somewhere on the Internet.
Fortunately you can get a free account at the Yahoo-owned Flickr photo archive service and use it for just this purpose. Hereâs howâŠ
First, pop over to the site and sign up for an account. Youâll have to enter a valid email address since it sends you a confirm message to prove youâre who you say that you are. Once thatâs done you can log in to your account where youâll see a big link that says Upload Photos. Click on that.
Now youâll be able to specify each of the photos you want to upload by clicking on the âbrowseâ button next to each of the six slots shown on the page:
You can see in this figure above that Iâve already specified an image to upload for the first slot. Since thatâs the only image I want to upload, Iâm ready to click on the UPLOAD button on the bottom. Notice, however, that I have specified âpublicâ for the permission to this file. I could specify something else, but it then wouldnât work for including the file in my weblog entry itself.
Next, youâll be prompted to enter a description and some key words:
Since weâre not going to be pointing people to the Flickr image browser but just hosting the image on the Flickr service, it doesnât matter if you enter anything here or not. I usually skip all of this information completely and just move along by clicking SAVE on this screen.
Almost done.
Now that you have the new image on the Flickr service, the next step is to figure out its Web address or âURLâ. That can be done by viewing the image in Flickr, as shown below, and clicking on the âAll Sizesâ button, where the cursor in the below image is pointing:
Click on the âAll Sizesâ button and, finally, youâll be shown the official URL of the image, suitable for cutting and pasting directly into your weblog entry:
In this case, the URL shown is http://static.flickr.com/26/59260931_afef08ff5_o.jpg.
To reference that in your blog entry, youâll need to either use an âadd imageâ feature if your blog editor has it (many do), or simply type in the following HTML:
In this specific instance, itâd look like this:
 alt=âSony PSP demonstration imageâ />
Once you have that mastered, it turns out that there are a lot of ways you can tweak the placement of images within text on a Web page, including adding vertical and horizontal space, changing the alignment of the material around the image and so on. Thatâs beyond the scope of this answer, but you might find it helpful to check out my book Creating Cool Web Sites, which will give you all the information you need to get everything âjust so.â
I hope this tutorial has been helpful!
I use http://www.g4vault.com no annoying ads and you can upload anonymously or create a free account and make it private
You are a god.
Iâve been trying to use Flickr as a host all afternoon. That âall sizesâ tip, was exactly what I needed.
Bravo & Thanks
how do i create a tweak to stop people from rite cliking on my pictures on myspace an saveing them as theres?
you can also use
http://www.uploadjpeg.com
very little adds, fast for image hosting, and free!
has anyone try http://www.photogiga.com?
http://www.ekono.net is much better than flickr. They are totally free. Offer 100MB space, 1MB file size limit and hotlinking is allowed.
The latest release of Simplog (http://www.simplog.org) has one click inclusion of photos from flickr built in.
Who will be the first to create a plugin for any popular blogging service that automates this? I want to press the âuploadâ button in my blogging software, choose between the available sizes and have the image included in a new blog entry.
Good post. This was the topic of the last Blogging Academy session I did this week. You can check out the wiki entry and listen to the podcast here:
http://www.bloggingacademy.com/2005/11/blogging-academy-podcast-8.html