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How to use iPhoto to share on Flickr

Sharing on Flickr from iPhoto is easy, especially after you read this brief overview.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
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Matt Elliott
2 min read
You can add a picture to a new or existing Flickr set, or you can just add it to your Flickr Photostream. Matthew Elliott/CNET

iPhoto makes sharing photos on Flickr a snap. The process is so simple, in large part, because there isn't a great deal of functionality built into iPhoto's Flickr integration beyond the capability to upload photos. True, you can also delete photos on Flickr from within iPhoto, and you can add a title and a description in iPhoto before or after a photo is uploaded that will appear on Flickr. And there is two-way syncing, so if you move photos among your various sets on Flickr, those changes are reflected in iPhoto. Let's take a quick look at the Flickr sharing options in iPhoto, starting with the first step of linking iPhoto to your Flickr account.

Before your initial upload to Flickr, you'll need to tell Flickr to play nice with iPhoto. Matthew Elliott/CNET

To upload a picture from your iPhoto library to Flickr, first highlight the files you'd like to share. Then from the top menu or from the row of icons in the lower-right corner of iPhoto, choose Share and Flickr. The first time you attempt to upload a photo to Flickr, you will need to go log in to your Flickr account, and from the site grant access to the iPhoto Uploader. After that, you can upload directly from iPhoto without first needing to visit Flickr.

Click on the Share button and choose Flickr to get the ball rolling. Matthew Elliott/CNET

When sharing a photo on Flickr, you'll see three options for placing the photo on the site: as part of a New Set (Flickr's word for album), an existing set, or just as part of your Photostream on Flickr without being associated with a set. And you can choose how public to make the photo: viewable by just you, your friends, your family, your friends and family, or anyone.

You can select how widely a photo can be viewed on Flickr. Matthew Elliott/CNET

From within iPhoto, you can then see which photos you've shared on Flickr. In the left-hand column, under the header titled Web, you'll see icons for online albums for such sites as MobileMe, Facebook, and Flickr (depending on which you've set up). Click on Flickr, and iPhoto will display a thumbnail for each of your Flickr sets. This page, however, does not show photos uploaded only to your Photostream. iPhoto shows how you might have shared a photo; click on the Info button in the lower-right corner and look for the Sharing header. It will show you if you've shared a photo on Flickr. But unlike with Facebook, iPhoto does not show you any comments that might have been made about a photo on Flickr.

From within iPhoto, you can view your various Flickr sets. Matthew Elliott/CNET

Lastly, you can delete photos or entire albums you've posted on Flickr from iPhoto. Right-click on a photo or the thumbnail of an album to find the delete option. When deleting an album from Flickr, you can choose to have your photos remain in your Photostream, or you can choose to delete the photos along with the album. Flickr photos deleted from within iPhoto will stay in your iPhoto library.

Don't like a picture you posted on Flickr? You can delete it right from iPhoto. Matthew Elliott/CNET

That's it for sharing on Flickr from iPhoto. Fairly straightforward. Click here for tips on sharing from iPhoto to Facebook.