Posted on April 11, 2007 at 11:24 AM in how-to
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
Thanks to some teamwork between Helio and Flickr/Yahoo, a glitch that was stopping photos from making it from a Helio device to Flickr has been fixed. Last night I confirmed that you can easily send photos taken on a Drift at up to full 1600 x 1200 to your Flickr account via Pic Msg. I love Flickr, and I love my Drift, and I'm extremely happy that they are again playing nice together. In honor of the occasion, here's a detailed how-to on publishing your photos to Flickr straight from your Helio, turning your Drift into a Flickr machine:
(Note: These instructions were written for a Drift, but should work for all Helio phones. If you're rocking a Heat, Kickflip, Hero, or if you're in the future and using an Ocean or Plasmatron 2287, the steps might be slightly different but the process is the same)
The Preliminaries.
- Make sure you have a Flickr account. A free one is perfectly fine. In your Flickr account, go to the email tab on your account page (or just go straight here once you're logged in) and find the choice to set up an upload-to-flickr email address. You'll then be sent to this page with your new address, which will look something like letters45numbers@photos.flickr.com. *This is important*. Count the number of characters -- you want a reasonably-sized email address, one that's not over 30 characters in total. Hit "reset" under "refresh your address" until you get an address with 12 characters or fewer before the "@" sign. Note down the email address you stick with. From here, you can also specify a set of tags(some people use "moblog" or the name of their cameraphone) that will automatically be attached to all photos uploaded via email, if you like. That's about all you need to do on the Flickr side.
- On the Helio Drift side, create a new contact in your address book -- call it "Flickr". Assign it the email address you just made for yourself.
- Go to Menu -> Message ->Pic Messages -> Settings [5] and choose "Background". Choose "no background" just to make sure you're not adding any overhead to your pic messages. Use the "back" key (below the navigation pad) to go back one, and now choose "Photo size." Make sure "Original size" is chosen so that your photos will get uploaded in their full glory.
- (Optional:)Go to Menu->Snap->Settings->Auto Save and make sure Auto Save is off. This makes it easier to send on the fly, because it gives you a "SEND" button on screen right after you snap every photo. It should be set to "off" by default anyway.
The instructions continue after the "read more" link.
The Main Event.
- Take a photo with your Drift. Go ahead, take a nice big 1600 x 1200. If you're in the "all-in" data package, you can stop worrying about how much data transfer you're using and freely take big photos and send them around. You can do this by pressing and holding the right side "camera" button, whether the Drift is slid or unslid. If it's closed, it may ask you to confirm that you want to activate the camera. Press the central round button with the flame on it to take a picture.
- Hit the left soft key under the word "SEND" (the button on the left, first one below the screen) and a "File Name" menu will come up. You can skip giving it a custom name if you like. Hit the flame key again.
- Now you're in the compose screen. If you want to add a title for your photo on the fly, Flickr seems to interpret the first line of text here as the title. You can also use "tags:" after the title, with your tags separated by a space, to add tags on the fly. (Updated:) Whether or not you enter something here, next press the flame key to get down to the "Recipient" field.
- Hit the left soft key under where it says "To:". If you added your upload-to-flickr address as a contact, choose "contacts" and type the first few letters -- "fli". By then you should be at the Flickr record. Hit the flame key for "OK" and scroll down to the email address and hit the flame key again. If you haven't added your Flickr email as a contact, instead of all of that choose "enter email" and type it in. Your Drift will remember your last few emailed contacts, so if you use this a lot your Flickr email will be there in the "To:" menu as a pre-set choice.
- That's it, and that's all. Hit send, and don't slide your Drift shut until the pic msg has sent to Flickr.
If you want to do anything more advanced like specifying the permission levels of your photo on the fly, check out this Lifehacker Tutorial.