If you haven’t heard, Flickr has made big waves lately by re-launching with 1TB (that’s a terabyte – 1000 gigabytes) of free storage for photograpers. Did you know that you can upload your photos directly from Lightroom to Flickr? One of my readers recently wrote in, asking how he could upload images straight from Lightroom to Flickr. Today, we’ll walk through it step by step!
Today, we’re taking a look at how to upload directly from Lightroom to Flickr with Flickr’s newly introduced 1 terabyte of free storage.
Before we get started, make sure you’re logged into Flickr in your web browser. This makes the process much smoother.
Part One: Connecting to Flickr
1) First of all, ensure that you’re working in the Library module. Next, on the left side of Lightroom, find the Publish Services panel.
2) Press the arrow to the left of it if it isn’t expanded, and you’ll see the “Flickr” button. Go ahead and click the Flickr button in the Publish Services panel.
3) In the window that appears, Click the Authorize button below “Flickr Account”.
4) Go ahead and press Authorize in the next window. This is why I recommend already being logged into Flickr in your web browser; if you are already logged in, all you have to do is press Authorize. Otherwise, you’ll have to switch to your web browser and get logged in, then return to this window and press authorize when you are complete.
5) Once you’re logged in, press Done.
6) This step is an optional one. In the “File Settings” part of the settings panel that’s still open, I always set the quality to 80 to get a great balance between keeping your files smaller yet high quality.
Optionally, we can set the quality to “80” to create a compromise between high image quality without maximum file size.
7) Another optional step to keep your files reasonably sized:
- Check the box for “Resize to fit”
- Set it to “Long Edge” from the dropdown
- Check the box for “Don’t Enlarge
- Set the pixels box to 2500
I also recommending setting this to “Resize to Fit” on the long edge with 2500 pixels. Checking “Don’t Enlarge” ensures that we won’t blow up images too large.
8) Finally, press save.
9) Great, now you will see that your accounts are connected in the Publish Services panel!
Your Flickr account name will show up on the left side once you enter all settings.
Part Two: Uploading to Flickr
10) You can either throw all of your photos into your Flickr photostreams all unorganized, or you can put them into a Photoset. I’ll show you how to put images into a photoset in this guide, but feel free to just throw them into your photostream instead.
Flickr has images organized into Photosets, and we can create and modify them. Think of photosets as albums on Flickr. To create a new Photoset, right click (Mac users, CMD + click) the “Photostream” item under Flickr, and choose Create Photoset.
Images on Flickr are organized into Photosets. You can right click the default “Photostream” to create a new photoset.
11) Next up, give the Photoset a name. If you leave “Include seleted photos” checked, the images you have selected (the ones in view in Lightroom’s workspace) will automatically be added into the new collection.
12) At this point, you may need to switch back to seeing “All Photographs”, so go ahead and click that on the “Catalog” panel.
After you create the photoset, Lightroom will switch from showing all your images to just the ones in the photostream. To jump back to seeing all photos, click “All Photographs” on the left side in the Catalog panel.
13) To add photos to a Flickr collection, you’ll want to be in Grid view. Press the G key on your keyboard to go into grid view or the button illustrated in the screenshot below.
Enter grid view by pressing G on your keyboard, or by clicking the grid icon in the Library module.
14) To finally add the photos to the collection, click and drag them from the grid to the name of the new collection on the left side of Lightroom. One tip: make sure you’re grabbing the photo area itself (not the border around it) while dragging it.
Click the image itself (not the area around it) and drag it onto a collection name to add it to the Flickr collection.
15) Great, once you’ve added all of your photos to the set, you’ll need to Publish the images. To do so, click the name of the collection. Lightroom will switch to a view that shows you the images in that set. Now, just press the Publish button and it will upload your images.
Finally, click the collection that you’ve been adding photos to and press the Publish button to push your images to Flickr.
All done! You can now view your newly created photosets on your Flickr profile.
Will you be connecting your Flickr account to Lightroom? With one terabyte of storage for free, it’s hard to pass up. If you need any help with this walk through, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll help you get it solved.