The free photo-sharing software Flickr is a quick, effective way to archive your photos, maintain a remote backup and embed slideshows like this:

Although there are other means of creating slideshows for your news site — like Slideshow Pro (used by College Publisher) and Soundslides Plus — there are advantages to using Flickr:

• Others can embed your slideshow on their sites/blogs
• Slideshow can be viewed full-screen at high resolution
• The photos are tagged and searchable in one of the largest photo-sharing Web sites on the web
• You don’t need to have access to your newsroom’s server to get the photos– only an Internet connection
• You can always go back and download the full-resolution image if your original gets erased
• Flickr makes the slideshow for you — you just grab the embed code
• The Flickr account  can be synced with Facebook or your paper’s blog

The only catch is that Flickr doesn’t use albums– but there’s a simple way around it: tags.

The unique tag is the key to embedding individual slideshows. For example, the slideshow above has a unique tag of “big west championship ’09” (which is the tag used to embed) so that the embedded photos don’t include all basketball photos ever uploaded to the account.

The slideshow option isn’t the most obvious feature. After clicking on your unique tag, look for the gray “slideshow” button on the top right:

If the tags concept is too much, consider buying a Pro Account. It’s only $24.95 a year (which averages to about two bucks a month).  With it, you get unlimited uploads and storage, unlimited sets and collections (which how you’d organize the photos), statistics and HD video uploads.

If your student media outlet is already on Flickr, please link us to your account in the comments so we can see how you’re using it.

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News writing for the web is a challenge. Not necessarily because it’s hard, but because it means changing the way you think. This lesson will be a foundation for future lessons on audio, video, Flash and all the fun skills you want to learn. But be patient. We’re taking this one step at a time.

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