I was inspired when I saw news about the Flickr Foundation to take another look at what Flickr has been up to since they were separated from Yahoo. I haven’t used Flickr much in years, but I know it remains popular with some photographers on Micro.blog.
In early versions of Sunlit, we let you browse your Flickr photo library and pick a photo to post to your blog. We removed the feature because the design was kind of backwards. I don’t want to post to Flickr first and then copy to my blog. I want to post photos to my blog first and then send a copy to Flickr, to share with followers on Flickr and to have an extra backup with a company that is committed to preserving web content.
Today we’re rolling out Flickr support in Micro.blog with that vision in mind. It’s enabled under Account → “Edit Feeds & Cross-posting”, just like sending blog posts to Twitter, Medium, Tumblr, and other services. As Micro.blog is processing your feed, when it finds a blog post that contains images, it uploads them to Flickr, including the title (if any) and text of the blog post.
It’s worth pointing out a couple things that this feature does not do:
- No uploading of full-resolution photos or EXIF data. If you want Flickr to have the best version of your photo and all metadata, you should continue to upload original photos to Flickr directly.
- No attempt to collect multi-photo blog posts into Flickr albums. If a blog post has multiple photos, they are uploaded individually with duplicate text.
In other words, if you already have a Flickr workflow that you like, you should probably continue to use it! This is for people who have a Flickr account that has gone unused, but who know there’s value on Flickr if only it was easier to remember to use it. Now there’s a simple way to save photos from your blog to Flickr automatically.
