Getting the most out of Flickr

I have to share this with you all as it is deals with an area – photos – that I often feel gets ignored in our communications work. To start with, it goes without saying that photos can go a long way in enticing readers into a story. In fact, in many instances the photo is the story. And this is particularly evident in the world of development communications where photos have often been used as the single entry point into a campaign on stopping hunger, improving the environment, global health and so on.

Whilst many of us in the field of communications are clearly aware of the relevance and value of good photos it must also be said that some of us (including yours truly) still struggle to gain acess to good quality photos and/or to even take good photos. In those cases where we have the photos we struggle in terms of storage and file sharing.

Similar to many other organisations we (the Comms Team) here at the NEPAD Agency have in the past year moved towards using flickr (free online photo site) as a resource for addressing some of the issues that we are struggling with. As I write, most of our good photos – those that we rely on consistently for our publications – can be accessed by all the Team members at any given time. This has not only improved our overall access to our photos - it has also enabled us to know exactly where each photo is and also to plan in terms of which areas of our work (agriculture, infrastructure etc) might require more relevant photos.

The challenge with all this is that sometimes not everyone on the Team is at the same level in terms of getting to grips with the full potential of Flickr. It is in this regard that I am pleased to see that our friends at Scriptoria www.scriptoria.co.uk recently produced a simple ‘How To’ users guide to Flickr that will quickly tell you and your colleagues how to use Flickr to store and distribute your best photos - making them available whenever you need them.

To download this free guide to using Flickr, click here. A big thanks to Dr. Jim Weale and his staff at Scriptoria for sharing and for making this freely available.

On another note – you can access our general photo gallery by clicking here.

Best wishes,

Andrew.