Send mobile phone pics to Flickr on-the-fly

Posted on April 15, 2008 at 5:34 am

Wish you could take a picture with your phone and upload it to Flickr directly? I take lots of pictures using my Blackberry Pearl mobile smartphone. And when I travel, I like to send new pictures, with title, caption, and tags, to a unique photo album on my Flickr account. That way I don’t end up with a mass of photos to upload at the end of the trip, and any notes I want recorded with the pictures are there. So I don’t end up wondering “what was the name of that?” or “who was that person I met?” With your email-enabled phone, Flickr let’s you do this easily!

Once you’ve snapped a picture and decided it’s a keeper, you use your phone’s email feature to send that picture as an attachment to Flickr. You can:

Set a photo title
Record a caption
Assign a default tag (such as a trip name) to all photos sent by email
Assign individual photo tags using a keyword in the email

Ready, set…

What you need:

-A free Flickr account, which is easy to sign up for, especially if you already use Yahoo! email
-A camera phone with email service

Here’s how it works. Log in to your Flickr account. Then go here to set your account up for email. It works by assigning you a unique email address to send your photos to Flickr.

Add the address to your mobile phone address book as “Flickr” or whatever shortcut works for you. Flickr let’s you change this address as often as you wish, using the “reset” button on this setup page.

On the same setup page, you set a default tag or tags to assign to every uploaded photo. I set this based on where I am traveling, or give it an event name if I am going out to a ballgame, concert or whatever. In this example I am using tags “San” “Francisco”. You can change this as frequently as you like.

Let’s Go!

Now I’m set for a trip! On this trip to San Francisco, every photo I upload to my Flickr account will be tagged with the words “San” and “Francisco.” On some photos this will be enough. On others, I will add tags using the “tag” keyword in my email body text. As an example, I have taken this picture of the Golden Gate bridge from the grounds of a museum known as the Palace of the Legion of Honour:

I send this picture up to my Flickr account using this email message:

Subject: Golden Gate Bridge (this becomes the photo Title in Flickr)

Message body:

As seen from the Palace of the Legion of Honour

Tag: bridge

The Tag keyword that I used above is part of my message body, and must appear on a new line of the message. The result, after a few seconds to transit the email and for Flickr to post it to my account, is this:

The picture is stored to my Flickr account with both the default tags “San Francisco” as well as my individual tag for this photo “bridge”. It appears in my Photostream, but is not yet part of an event (Flickr’s term for a photo album). So, at the conclusion of my trip or whenever I can get on the internet, I use Flickr’s “Organize” tab to

1. Create a new event folder called SF 2008

2. Search for photos with the San Francisco tag (these will be my current trip!)

3. Drag them into the new event

And this is the new event, on the left, after dragging the photos in:

My photos are titled, captioned, tagged and organized and I’ve barely unpacked!

Pete Kushmeider, Writer and blogger

Technorati Tags: Flickr,smartphone

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3 Responses to “Send mobile phone pics to Flickr on-the-fly”

Madhur Kapoor said on : April 15th, 2008 at 8:35 am

THis is great. Now i can put my mobile internet connection to good use.

akishore said on : April 15th, 2008 at 8:43 am

Madhur, yeah it’s awesome to be able to send pictures directly from your phone to your Flickr account. Makes that camera on the phone so much more useful now!

Thilak said on : April 15th, 2008 at 12:34 pm

Flickr doesn’t have a app for Blackberry? My N95 came pre-installed with a app called “Share Online”, which integrates with Flickr and some other photo, video sharing sites to upload photos on the go.

I’ve seen the same app on other Nseries devices as well.