Obtaining images from

Flickr is a photo-organizing and photo-sharing site, similar to Picasa or to the photo-sharing feature of Facebook. Unlike most other photo-sharing sites, though, it's geared to serious photographers who use Flickr to store and share large images. It makes those images available for viewing or downloading in a variety of sizes, from a tiny thumbnail about 100 pixels wide up to the maximum size image that the camera produces, 3000 pixels or more. Navigating through Flickr's wide selection of possibilities is easy once you've done it a time or two. This guide should help you get started.

How photos are organized in Flickr

Flickr has three levels of organization:

• The individual photos themselves, each with its own page.
• Sets of photos that are related somehow, such as all taken on the same date.  A set is like a folder on a computer that contains a number of photos.
• Collections, which are like folders on a computer that contain other folders.  A collection can contain a number of sets, or it can contain other collections, but not both at once.

Collections are for large groupings, such as all vacation pictures or all sports pictures.  If you had a "Sports" collection, it might contain more collections such as "Softball" and "Tennis".  Inside "Softball" might be a separate set for each game played.

A collection's page

If you are given a link to a Flickr collection of, say, travel photos, it will take you to a page that looks something like this:

 

 

This collection contains more collections:  Scotland 2011, England 2011, and so on.  Each little rectangular "mosaic" contains tiny images extracted from some of the photos in its collection.  Click on one of the mosaics or on one of the collection titles to see the page for that collection.  If you click the mosaic or title for Scotland 2011, you'll see a page like this:

Now you're getting somewhere.  This collection contains sets of photos, not more collections.  You can tell the contents are sets because each entry has just one thumbnail, not a mosaic.  There's a set of Edinburgh photos, and a set of photos of St Giles' Cathedral.

A set's page

Click on the Edinburgh thumbnail or title to see a page like this:

This is the Edinburgh set's page.  It has a small square thumbnail for each photo in the set, arranged in an order chosen by the Flickr account owner. The big image on the left is the one from which the thumbnail was made that you saw on the previous (collection) page. Clicking on any of the thumbnails will take you to the individual page for that photo.

Slideshow:  If you just want to see all the set's photos in order, just click the "Slideshow" link that appears at the top right of the grid of thumbnails.  Make your browser window as large as possible before doing this.  Flickr will show all the pictures in large format on a black background, fading from one to the next after several seconds.

An individual photo's page

If you click on the second image on the first row, the one that appears to be a photo of a statue, you'll see this:

Each photo on Flickr has a page like this. You can see when and often where the photo was taken, the photo's title and caption, and a set of comments (if any) by people who have viewed the photo. I usually just use the photo's number from the camera as the title because it's unique, but I try to put a meaningful caption. If this photo had any comments, they would appear below the caption.

Downloading a photo

Let's say that this image particularly appeals to you and you want to download it. Flickr makes photos available for downloading in a range of sizes. Each size has a name:

Square	75×75 pixels taken from the middle of the scaled-down photo
Thumbnail	The whole photo, scaled to 100 pixels on the long side
Small	240 pixels on the long side
Medium 500	500 pixels on the long side
Medium 640	640 pixels on the long side
Large	1024 pixels on the long side
Original	Whatever size was uploaded, in this case 2420×2885

Which size you should download depends on what you want to do with the photo.

To send the photo in e-mail, one of the Medium sizes or the Large size should work well. The Original size will be several megabytes and is usually not appropriate for e-mail.

To post the photo on another photo-sharing site, Medium or Large should work well.

If you want to print the photo as a 4×6 inch snapshot, Large works very well, Medium 640 is acceptable, and Medium 500 is borderline acceptable. Small, Thumbnail, and Square are useless for printing, but they can be useful on web sites.

If you want to print larger than 4×6 inches, definitely download the Original size.

You can't just right-click the displayed image and save it to your computer; Flickr's photo pages are set up so as to disallow that because some photographers don't want their images downloaded at all. To download an image, left-click the "Actions" button above the picture, and select "View all sizes" from the drop-down menu that appears, like this:

When you select this, a page like this appears (showing the top portion only):

Each of the size names is a link; clicking one of them will show a similar page displaying the photo in that size. The page you're on is showing the Large size; you know that because the "Download" line above the sizes says "Download the Large size of this photo".

Finally, you're at the point where you can save a photo on your computer and then do what you want with it. If the Large size is what you want, just click the "Download the Large size of this photo" link. Or right click on the image and select "Save image as..." or whatever phrase your browser uses. (That works on this page.)

If you want a different size, just click on the size name and a different page will come up, showing that size photo. Then click the "Download" link, or right-click and "Save image as".

Regardless, you'll have to specify where to put it on your computer and you'll probably want to give the saved image a meaningful name. The name that Flickr uses to save the image is a random-looking string of numbers and letters, such as "6234589075_4f3f4094ef_m.jpg". Depending on your browser, you may be able to change the name before the picture is saved, or you may have to change it afterward. Be sure to keep the ".jpg" file type on the end of the name.

Viewing and downloading other pictures

To see more pictures in the same set, use the browsers "Back" button to get back to the set's page with all the little square thumbnails, and then click a different thumbnail to see that photo's page.