This page describes how to get your pictures of parkrun events onto the photos page of an event's website.
Before you start
The photographers will need their own Flickr accounts (see http://www.flickr.com). Many photographers will already have Flickr accounts. For those who don't, Flickr accounts come in two flavours:
- Free flickr are currently limited to 300MB of uploads per month, which should be sufficient for most casual parkrun photographers.
- Pro accounts (currently $24.95 per year) have no upload limits and no storage limits.
Further details are available on the flickr FAQ.
The upload process
Uploading photos to event photo pages is done entirely through the Flickr website:
- If you're keen to limit your monthly upload (usually if you have a free account), resize your photographs first.
- Upload your photographs to your Flickr account as usual. Plenty of further help on this topic is on the Flickr site. The three main options are:
- Simple Web Uploader tool - very quick and easy to use, but only allows 6 photos to be uploaded at a time.
- Standard Web Uploader tool - simple browser based uploading tool - can upload a big batch of photos at once, but cannot resize photos at same time.
- Desktop Uploadr Tool - A free downloadable desktop application (Windows and apple version) - will allow you to resize photos before uploading. Download from http://www.flickr.com/tools/
- If you have not already joined your event's Flickr group you should do so (follow the link at the top of the event's photo page).
- Mark the uploaded photos you want to be added to the group.
- The photos will appear automatically on the event's photo page - you may need to refresh your browser. If you have only just joined Flickr there will be a delay of a few days while Flickr approve your account (they're just making sure you're not a spammer). If you have been using Flickr for some time then the photos will appear pretty much instantly.
- Tip - to help the runners find specific photos, please use the Flickr tagging facility (Flickr lets you set all tags for a whole batch of photos at once). At the very least please tag all the photos for one run with the date of the run in fixed format - for example photos for a run on 5th March 2011 should be tagged:
'''5-March-2011'''
Please include the hyphens and spell the month name in full. This allows anybody to link straight to a particular week's photos.
If your local event has a different preferred tagging system they will have mentioned this on the discussion page of their Flickr Group. Please follow their preferred appoach it will help other parkrunners to find photos.
Troubleshooting
I can only upload 6 photos at a time
The simple web uploader is limited to six photos at a time (it is designed to make it easy as possible to upload very small sets of photos). However, the standard web uploader page or the free desktop Uploadr tool are both able to upload very large sets of photographs. All three methods are mentioned above, but described fully on the Flickr site, (or alternatively try Googling Flickr).
Flickr takes ages to upload my photographs
Flickr's approach is not to adjust your photographs unless you specificaly ask it to; in particular it does not (by default) resize your photographs before uploading, and so unless you have resized your photographs it will upload them at full resolution. The Flickr Uploadr tool can be set to resize before uploading (which considerably speeds up the upload process).
My photographs are not showing on my event's photos page
If you have joined your event's Flickr group and added your photographs to the group (as above), but they are still not showing on the photos page, then almost certainly this will be because of one of two main reasons:
- If you have just joined Flickr for the first time and you have not previously uploaded any photographs, flickr performs some basic checks to make sure your account is genuine. There may be a delay of a few days before your first photographs show up; from then on however, your photographs will show up in the group as soon as you add them.
- Please check your privacy settings - this has proved to be the most common reason that photos don't appear. Make sure that you have set your personal privacy settings to let people see your photos, and check that the photographs themselves do not have their visiblity set to private (or the sets you may have placed them in).