Lloyd K. Barnes Photography

I'm a regular Flickr user and have developed a few ways to be more productive when I visit the site. I post photos, check out the latest photos from my contacts and explore a few groups every day.

It can be time consuming, but if you use a few tricks you can be much more effective with the time you spend on the site.

Posting to Groups

I use Steeev's Multi Group Sender when I want to post a photo to several different groups. It's a Greasemonkey script that works with Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome browsers. When you install the script, a dropdown menu will be available above each of your photos on Flickr. It gives you a much faster way to select groups and send your photo to them at once and saving you lots of time!

Viewing Photostreams

I use Cooliris to quickly explore photostreams on Flickr. This includes photos in a group, in a contact's photostream, in sets, and in all your contact's recent uploads. Once you install Cooliris, a small icon will appear on photos. When you click on it, the photos will appear on black and you can rapidly browse in a very cool interface. You can stop and click on the link to return to Flickr to comment and favourite buy tramadol on line photos. Cooliris works with photos in other photostreams besides Flickr as well.

Commenting

Commenting is a great way to give feedback in the Flickr community, but many groups have special codes that they want you to use. Instead of the using the time-consuming process of cutting and pasting the codes every time you visit a group, you can install the Greasemonkey script Trailr, which will automate inserting the comment codes for you once you have set them up.

Uploading

I use the Flickr Uploadr tool most of the time. It's free and lets you rename, tag and send photos directly to sets. If you have Lightroom 3, you can use the Publish Services panel in the Library module to upload photos. I use Lightroom a lot and will be using this feature more often. Another great way to upload from Lightroom is with Jeffrey's "Export to Flickr" Lightroom  plug-in. It is much more comprehensive than the Flickr Uploadr tool, with all sorts of ways of handling your uploads, including sending a message to Twitter after completing the upload.

Flickr Stats

This is a great way to monitor activity on your Flickr account - you get information on numbers of views, where the traffic is coming from, and what keywords were used to search for your images.

More Tips

What productivity tools do you use with Flickr? Add them in the comment section!

Check out Squidoo and Flickr Tips for more Flickr secrets and tips.