Sharing Your Pictures - with Flickr

There is now a way you can save and share your peregrine pictures for everyone to see.

Today we are launching Derby Cathedral Peregrine Pictures - a Group Pool on Flickr - a popular photo-sharing website.


You can now save webcam pictures, or share images you've taken around Derby Cathedral of our birds. Once you've uploaded and put your pictures in our "pool" we can than copy or link to those pictures for use in this peregrine blog. But people can also just go there and see what magic moments others have captured from our webcams, or during their time visiting Derby Cathedral.

So as to keep a modicum of order we do ask you to read and agree to some basic group rules for posting pictures. (Photographers and authors do have copyright of their work, but anyone wanting to re-use an image posted here often need only contact the creator and request their permission. More often than not it wll be granted. )

For those not familiar with http://www.flickr.com/ here are some simple instructions for joining.

1) You will first need to set yourself up as a user by registering. (It's free, providing you don't want to upload more than 100Mb of pictures per month.)

2) You will then have to upload the picture/s you want to share to your own photostream (as they call it on Flickr. These are your photos on your pages - we can't see them yet in our Group Pool).

3) You can caption, label and even tag your own pictures so that they make sense to others. Please includes dates so that everyone will appreciate when they were taken.
4) Now you'll need to join our Group Pool (and of course confirm your agreement to follow the rules). Then you can add the pictures from your "photostream" to our Group for all to see in one place. The elusive little icon to "Add to Group" lies on the left side of a line of icons above your image.

Flickr does have its own help pages which gives more details on each step. Good luck!


So how do I save a Screenshot?
This has been asked and answered many times before, but with Windows the quickest way is simply to hit the PrintScreen button on your keyboard which saves the screen image into your Clipboard. Open any image editing package on your computer, then paste the contents of the clipboard into it. (e.g. Paint, IrfanView, Photoshop etc). You'll need to crop away the unwanted bit of image and then save as a .jpg file. (Avoid saving as .bmp or .png) This file is what you'll then upload to your account on Flickr, and after that you'll want to add it to our Group Pool.


How do I save LOTS of screenshots automatically?
Ah, this really is a magic trick! (A £1 donation to the project for everytime you use this, please!) You'll need an image editing package capable of automatically capturing screenshots. I swear by IrfanView, both for home and work use and it can be freely downloaded. It is an amazingly simple image editing package which can do batch edits to multiple images as well as scheduling automatic screen capture. (It was Froona who taught me the latter trick) The shortcut key to this function is just 'C' and you can then set the progam to save an image of your desktop or client area at a specified interval to any directory you choose. You can also set a limit to the size of file saved to disk - 80kb is reasonable), which is helpful if you leave it running for some time. Set your computer to show Thumbnails in this directory, and you have a quick way of skimming through hours of images captures very quickly to spot sudden changes in position, or some other activity you are looking for. Deleting unwanted files as you go helps make the management task easy.
Irfanview also does a great job of browsing through saved images and cropping and renaming the ones you want to keep. Left click the mouse to start drawing a rectangle over the area of image you want to crop, then Ctrl-Y crops away everything outside it. 'S' is a shortcut to save the file.


I don't want to use Flickr - how can I post a link that works reliably?
You might already use Photobucket, or other imaging-sharing websites, and want to post a link to your picture by leavng a "Comment" in our blog. Long website addresses often get split up in our limited comments page and then fails to work. So why not give a shorter link instead? To do this, highlight and copy your long url. Then go to http://www.is.gd/ and paste it into the box provided. Click "Compress That Address!" and you get a new url which you can then paste here far more reliably than before.


If you have problems with any of these instructions, please post a comment and I'll ammend the guidance accordingly.

Let's hope for some great egg-hatching moments shared for all to see over the next few weeks!