If you haven’t used Flickr before this may seem a little complicated but it’s straightforward in practice if you follow the instructions. Newbury Camera Club have added notes to the Flickr group’s ‘home page’ to help you.

Signing up to flickr

It takes less than a minute to create a free Flickr account and to start posting pictures to it.

To do this you must have either a Yahoo! ID (Flickr is owned by Yahoo!) or you can sign in to Yahoo! with a Facebook or Google account.

You create a new account here: http://www.flickr.com/ and just follow the simple instructions, depending on whether you are already a Facebook or Google user, or starting from scratch.

If starting from scratch, with no existing Yahoo!, Facebook or Google ID’s, you simply have to fill in your name and address, gender, birthday, select an ID and password, follow some security steps and click on the Create My Account box. Then log in to flickr where you cam immediately start browsing all the photos.

Uploading your own pictures to Flickr

Flickr has a variety of uploading tools that make this very simple. The easiest way for new flickr users to upload their pics is to use http://www.flickr.com/photos/upload/

You simply choose the photos from your computer, click on upload to Flickr, set the privacy level (in the case of the competition this should be “Public”) and click on Upload.

Adding your pictures to the Newbury Carnival group

When you have created an account and have signed in, click on this link to go to the Newbury Carnival group (or search for the group using the ‘group’ button in Flickr) and then click ‘join’ and the administrator will add your name to the group.

Once this is done, and you have uploaded your photos as described above, you add them to the group during the next step, when you edit them.

Editing files in Flickr once uploaded

This step starts automatically after you have uploaded, and flickr suggests you add a description, or other features. This is where you should identify the category being entered, ie whether junior or senior. We will be able to contact the photographer after they have a flickr account if they have been successful in the competition, or for any other reason where clarification of the photo may be needed.

That’s it really. The site is very user friendly – it has to be, as there are over 20 million flickr users and about 150 million photos on flickr, with 3,000 loaded every minute!