How to post event photos on the Flickr photo sharing website

I would like to explain how you may load photos up to the Flickr  photo website and tag them so everyone can have access to a single slide show that merges the photos taken by many different people at a conference or other event.

This is a great way of sharing photos of a conference and captures the heart and the soul of an event - especially if you include photos of people during coffee and lunch breaks when they are chatting and networking. At an iCafe in London recently we hired a professional photographer to capture the event - see above. I think you will agree the photos are outstanding. Or take a look at the embedded slideshow of the conference and social photos taken at ECKM 2005 at the bottom of this page.

I you would like to do it for an event you have attended here's how!

• To upload a small numbers of photos to Flickr you need to open a free account. With a free account you may upload 20mb a month (for US$25 you can upgrade your account and upload 20GB of photos per month!)
  
  
• To upload as many photos as possible for free - you need to reduce the size of the individual photos - this would normally take a lot of effort but Flickr provides a batch upload program  - that automatically reduces the size of your photos for you.
  
  
• Sign up for a free Flickr account
  
  
• Downward the Flickr batch upload program
  
  
• Upload your photos to your Flickr account
  
  
• But there is one important thing that you should do when you upload. Flickr allows you to 'tag' your photos with one or more labels or 'tags'
  
  
• If everyone who uploads photos of the event tags their photos with at least one unique tag that identifies the event then everyone's photos can be merged into a single slide show.
  
  Lets show you an example. Gabriela Avram and I both took photos at a KM conference in Limerick in September 2005 and we each tagged our photos with the tag "ECKM05".
  
  On the Flickr website you can view these as a singe collection of photos  or as a integrated slideshow .
  
  
• Someone needs to define the common tag and communicate to the participants of the event the name of the tag. For sake of example, lets call it "EventABC".
  
  This tag needs to be UNQUE. It should be one that is unlikely to be used by anyone else. It should uniquely identify the event. e.g. "ECKM2006" or "GurteenConferenceLondonSept2006". It does not need to 'look' nice as it is primarily being used to group photos together but the cleaner, simpler and more intuitive it is the better. Its also ok to to have other more generic tags such as "socialnetworking" or "knowledgemanagement" or whatever you care to select.
  
  So tag your event photos as "Event ABC". You must get this exactly right and include the double quotes.
  
  
• That's it you are done!
  
  
• One further feature. If you wish to embed the slideshow on a website or weblog then use the flowing code - simply copy and paste the code into the HTML on your website page and edit the tag name.

  <div align=center> <iframe src="http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?tags=EventABC" align="middle" frameborder="0" height="500" scrolling="no" width="500"></iframe> </div>

• I have done this on my website for CROInfo 2006 both here  and below.
  
  

  Finally, you can size and display  individual photos on a website that have been uploaded and hosted by Flickr. this is an example to the left.