I post tons of pix over on my main homepage, and up until recently I would studiously crop and resize each picture for upload to my hosted domain. Even with the pictures optimized for minimum byte usage, eventually they’ll fill up the server, which was happening to me after posting roughly a dozen pictures a week over more than two years. I could just ask my hosting company for more server space, but I’m guessing it’d be way more expensive than the $24.95 a year flickr.com charges, and it’ll let me post up to 2 gigabytes of pictures a month.

The upside to my DIY picture posting was that I can make the pictures any size I want, while Flickr has four standard photo sizes. This is not really a big deal: all you have to do is resize your blog’s main text block to make room for a Flickr pic. The “medium” size is 500 pixels wide, which is fine for most blogs.

Once you’ve made room for the pix, the fun begins: you can post the easy way — using
Flickr’s “Blog this” or its e-mail posting functions — but easy comes at a price: you can post only one picture per blog entry, which makes it impossible to do things my way: write a photo essay with a bunch of inline images.

Fortunately, though, Flickr provides a work-around: an “all sizes” tab that appears above a picture. Clicking on this gives the option of downloading a picture in one of the four standard sizes. When the page loads on your screen, a text box appears below the pic with HTML coding that you can cut and paste into your blog (thanks to Bastish.net for sharing this tip).

The benefits of letting Flickr host your pix are twofold: you can create an online archive of your favorite shots, protecting you from a hard-disk crash, and you can spread out your bandwidth usage over two sites so your site doesn’t get hammered by the hordes of visitors arriving to celebrate your 15 minutes of infamy.