A few people have asked me how I get the pictures onto my blog site. Well, it's very easy to do and you can have your own online gallery setup quickly, plus there's the added benefit of being able to send photos direct from your phone.
First, you need an account at flickr.com. Due to the amount of photos I already had from an older system I had to pay for my account, but the normal accounts are free. It's a great way to have an online gallery and they've got a wide selection of tools to let you upload photos from your PC that you may already have. The site is owned by Yahoo!, so you'll need a Yahoo! account to log in, however this doesn't take too long to setup.
Now that you've got an account, click their tools page. There's mobile phone upload tools like ShoZu but I found the easiest way is simply by email. Once you've uploaded your shots you can include them on your own website with the >flickr badge, but I'm getting ahead of myself...
The ever-so-slightly-tricky way...
To send email on your phone you'll need to set up a mail account. Click "New Email Account" to do this and run through the setup. Don't forget that, if you're using POP email, you'll need to set the outgoing server to be either..
A) The outgoing server of your network if you intend sending mail whilst using the network.
B) The outgoing server of your internet provider if you intend sending mail whilst on WiFi or sync'd
C) The secure outgoing server of your provider
The reason for this is that providers will only let you send email out if you're directly connected to them. Let's assume I'm on T-Mobile and I want to send an email - I CAN'T use the smtp settings for my home broadband provider, because the email will be coming from an IP address that my home broadband provider doesn't trust.
Confused?
The easy way..
Well, luckily there is another way. Let's drop the idea of setting up an email account then. Let's assume you've set up your flickr.com account up and you want to send a picture to it. Click their tools page and choose "upload by email". You will be allocated a weird email address to upload to - don't worry to much if it looks strange, it's just a way to specify your account. You can also choose "tags" to be uploaded each time, such as "gears drunken blog" or something like that.
The email address it gives (I've blurred out mine above) should be added as a contact so you can easily find the address and send mail to it...
Now we're pretty much done. You can send emails via POP or Exchange if that's setup on your system, but I'm going to show you the easy eay. If you've only decided to setup a flickr.com account and save the flickr.com email address as a contact then that's fine, because this is all you really need to do to get going.
Posting a picture to your online gallery...
Take a picture of something. If you've already done this, go into "Pictures and Videos" and find it. Now choose "Menu" and "Send via MMS". If you've setup and email account on your phone, just choose "Send" here...
You can use the subject line to give your photo a title and the body to add a description. Personally I just add something in the subject line...
Now you just click send, wait for about a minute and magically your image will appear in your online gallery at flickr.com..
You can then set yourself up a flickr badge and include it on your site, or promote your gallery on the social networking site of your choosing.. :)
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