flickr
May 11, 2006
Placing pictures online is a great way to share memories of youth trips. It also keeps everyone from coming up to you and asking for copies of the recent youth trip pictures. For the past few years, we have been posting pictures online during our youth trips. A couple of years ago, one mom emailed and asked me to tell her daughter to wear more sunscreen 
. Needless to say, pictures help parents feel more connected to their kids while they are on youth trips. Pictures also serve as a great tool for promoted upcoming trips.
However, finding a good way to share pictures online can be daunting, and who has time to design picture pages on a website during a youth trip. A great solution for churches is a website called Flickr. Flickr was an independent company that was recently purchased by Yahoo. They are hands down the best picture sharing site out there.
Here are a few advantages to Flickr:
First of all, it is free! There is a 20MB upload limit on free accounts, but purchasing a pro account is only $25/year. The pro account also allows you to create sets of pictures which come in handy for trips. We purchased a pro account and have found the features to be worthwhile.
Secondly, it is very easy to set up and upload pictures! There is a picture upload tool that you can download and simply drag and drop pictures into the tool.
Thirdly, you can make a Flickr webpage and set it up so that it can be linked from your webpage. Once you set it up, kids can go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourchurchname and see your pictures. If you don’t do your website, you can simply give this url to your web person and you are set. You can also pass out this address to your parent prior to a trip and they can go right to your pictures. There are also ways to make badges for your website that look really cool.
Fourthly, if you really want to get the most advantage from Flickr, you can tag your photos. Here is a great description of tags from the Flickr site
Tags are like keywords or labels that you can add to a photo to make it easier to find later. You can tag a photo with tags like "catherine yosemite hiking mountain trail" and then later on if you are looking for pictures of Catherine you can just click on that tag and get all photos that have been tagged that way.
Fifthly, Flickr allow you to have buddies (or I guess they call it “contacts”). So any youth or families that use Flickr, can be added as contacts and therefore linked to the account. It is a really nice feature to connect everyone together.
If you have thought about putting pictures online, but have held back because you think it might be really complicated, look no further. Give Flickr a try!
