Photo Contribution Instructions

Thank you for your interest in contributing photos to the Todd Bird Club photo gallery. The gallery displays photos taken of birds in Indiana, Armstrong, and Cambria Counties, Pennsylvania, or of birds taken by Todd Bird Club members while traveling to other locations. Photos are also chosen at random from this gallery to be displayed in the top right corner of every page on the Todd Bird Club Web site. If you have photos that you would like to contribute, please follow the instructions below.

Create a Flickr account

Our photo gallery is stored at Flickr. Whenever you visit the photo gallery on the Todd Bird Club Web site, our software retrieves the photos from Flickr and displays them on the Todd Bird Club Web page. You can only contribute photos from a Flickr account. If you already have a Yahoo, Google, or Facebook account, you can log onto Flickr with that account. Otherwise, you will need to create a new account. We will give you instructions here for creating a Yahoo account. Flickr is owned by Yahoo.

Go to http://www.flickr.com.
Click on the "Create Your Account" button near the top right corner of the screen. A small window will pop up.
Near the bottom of the pop up window, underneath the question, "Do you have a Yahoo! ID?", click on the "Create New Account" button. The pop up window will disappear and you will see the Yahoo Registration page.
Enter demographic information, a username and password, and the code at the bottom of the page. Click on "Create Account". A congratulations page will appear.
Click on the "Continue" button. This will take you to a Flickr page.
Enter a Flickr screen name. This is the name that appears as the credits for your photos in the Todd Bird Club gallery. Many people enter aliases, such as birdfreak123. But if you want people to know that these are your photographs, then enter your real name. You can change this later, if you wish.
Click on step 1, "Personalize your profile". Follow the instructions to customize your account. You can skip all of these steps, if you wish. They can all be set later and the default settings will work fine for sharing photos with the Todd Bird Club.
If you followed the three setup steps, then click on the "jump over to your home page" link. Otherwise, go to http://www.flickr.com and, now that you are logged in, you will be at your home page.

Upload your photos

When you upload photos to Flickr, the photos will be stored in their original size and several smaller sizes. If you have a free Flickr account rather than a paid Flickr Pro account, then you have a limited amount of storage space. If you have large photos, then you might want to consider reducing them to 800x600 or 640x480 before uploading them.

Go to the Flickr home page at http://www.flickr.com. If you are not already signed in, click on the "Sign In" link in the top right corner and log in.
Click on the "Upload" link at the right side of the horizontal navigation bar near the top of the page. This will take you to a page listing the three steps required to upload photos.
Follow the three steps, "Choose photos and videos", "Upload", and "Add titles, descriptions, tags or add to a set". See the next item for instructions on entering tags for your photos.
The Todd Bird Club Web site will use your photo's tags when visitors want to search the gallery. In order for the search to work properly, we have to maintain some standard conventions for our tags. For each species of bird in your photo, enter the species common name in double quotes, and the scientific family, genus, and species names. Capitalization is not important. For example, for a Great Blue Heron photo, your tag should include:
"Great Blue Heron" Ardeidae Ardea herodias
Common names for North American birds should be taken from the American Ornithologists' Union checklist. Scientific family, genus, and species names are also listed on this site. Feel free to add more tags, if you want to help other Flickr users find your photos.
If you can, indicate the location of each of your photos using the map that is displayed along the right side of each photo's page. This is called geocoding. The Todd Bird Club's Web site will use this in its gallery search function to allow visitors to select only local bird photos in the tri-county area or to select bird photos from other locations.

Add your photos to the Todd Bird Club group

After you upload your Flickr photos, you must still add them to Flickr's Todd Bird Club group before they will appear in the Todd Bird Club gallery.

Go to Flickr's Todd Bird Club group page at http://www.flickr.com/groups/toddbirdclub. If you are not already signed in, click on the "Sign In" link in the top right corner and log in.
If you are not already a member of the Todd Bird Club Flickr group, then click on "Join This Group".
Click on the "Add something" link above the thumbnails of the group's most recently added photos. This will take you to a page that displays thumbnails of your photos.
Select the photos that you want to add to the Todd Bird Club group, and click on the "Add to Group" button. Now the Todd Bird Club Web site will automatically incorporate your photos into its gallery.

If you are a new Flickr member or if you are a member who has never uploaded any photos, then you will have to wait a few days before your photos will be visible to the public or to the Todd Bird Club Web site. Flickr staff will review your photos to be sure that their content is appropriate for a general audience. Once they have marked your account as safe, these photos and any new photos that you upload will immediately become visible to the public and to the Todd Bird Club Web site. If the delay is too long, you can request that Flickr staff review your account.

Thank you for contributing your photographs to the Todd Bird Club community. You will find many other wonderful bird photographs at Flickr.