A short guide to quickly and easily embedding photos in your website or blog.

I quickly realised when designing & coding my website that it’s not easy to create a gallery for my photos. Coding by hand is very time consuming. Even using a flash application like Simpleviewer it still takes time to resize photos and prepare multiple galleries. Leaving photos out of my website is not an option - it’s a photography website.

Then I saw SlideFlickr in use here and decided to try it. As the name suggests you do need to have a Flickr account to use it. If you haven’t tried Flickr yet then it’s definitely worth a go, even if it’s just to make a slideshow with SlideFlickr. Flickr is both free and extremely versatile.

How to use SlideFlickr:

1. Create a Flickr account and upload photos. SlideFlickr will run quicker if you make the photos small for the web. I typically size mine at 800 pixels wide and use the ‘Save for web and devices…’ option on PhotoShop CS3 to make a file sized at 150kb or less.
2. If you don’t want to display all the photos in your account create a set for the slideshow.
3. Go to SlideFlickr and follow the 3 step instructions:
4. Insert your Flickr username or url. For example, mine is http://www.flickr.com/photos/magicalplaces/
5. Customise your slideshow. Here you can choose the size, the background colour, the name, the speed, add your own logo, add music or assign a creative commons license. You can also choose which photos in your flickr account to display: all of them, or a specific set, tags or your favourites.
6. Hit the preview button!
7. If you like what you see, copy the html code that appears below the word Embed.
8. You can then place the html code in your webpage or (almost any) blog.

Below is the example that I created. Whenever I add new photos to my Flickr favourites, they will be automatically displayed in the widget.

Verdict: This is an excellent, easy to use, free widget. All you need is a flickr account and the ability to follow simple instructions. No knowlegde of html or coding required. As a way of quickly adding photos to a website or blog, I’ve yet to find anything easier or faster.

The only disadvantage is that it can’t be used on a Wordpress.com blog as wordpress doesn’t allow embedded objects. If you host a wordpress blog on your own server, it will work fine.

What do you think of SlideFlickr? Have you used any other widgets to display photos on a website or blog? Share your comments below.

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