Many paid-for services and community blogsites allow you to setup your own photo gallery / album to contain your scrapbook layouts and other interesting photos. Normally these operate quite easily, with uploading photos or multiple photographs and putting these up as thumbnails onto the main album pages.

But with blogger accounts and those of other free services, there is often no additional storage space for actual albums for you. You have to find other ways to post your photos, aside from the individual uploads of an image into an actual blog article itself.

Posting Photos Using Hello (Using Bloggerbot)

Many people with Blogger.com blogs use a free application called Hello to help with posting photographs. Hello is also now widely used for photo sharing with friends similarly to how MSN or Yahoo Messengers and similar apps work. But we’ll be using Hello for sharing - to a blogsite.

Installing Hello 

Firstly, download Hello if you don’t already have it. Go to this URL, and click on the Download Now picture on the right. On the next page, it tells you it’s made for Blogger too. How obvious is that? On this page you will need to create a Hello User account. In this case, we’ll set it up for the Blog itself - but you can setup the name and details to suit.

Run it. On the first installation, you will have to set your Hello Username up. Then signin.

Right, now let’s set it up with photos etc. First setup your Profile, under Tools —> Edit Profile. Enter your real name, and Weblog link if you wish. This is more helpful if you’re going to use Hello for photo sharing with friends. You haven’t quite finished your account registration as yet either. Click on Tools —> Account Management, and you will be taken onto the internet, where Hello will want you to confirm your email address with a button. Once you’ve done this, an email is actually sent out to that address. Logon to your emails, and find this. In the email will be a link to click to validate the address with Hello (the email comes from Picasa). Click this to complete Hello Registration.

 Posting Photos from Hello to a Blogger Blog

1. When in Hello, Click on Send Picture. A small box will come up giving you the option to find photos using Picasa (a free photo album software) or Windows Explorer. Using either, browse and find the photo(s) you want to post to the blog
2. Now you have a Select the Friends you Want to Send the Photo(s) to box. In this case, your friend is something called, Bloggerbot. Select Bloggerbot to highlight it. Click Send.
3. Because you’ve not (yet) setup, you will eventually be taken to the Blogger signon page. Signon to your Blogger account using your normal Blogger username and password.
   
4. Blogger will open, giving you some options for the image, including inline sizes, and archive sizes. These are particularly useful when you are sending large layouts, but try to keep them to a reasonable size, as you would do so for a gallery upload. Inline means the thumbnail image found in your blog entry itself. Click Save.
5. You will be returned to Hello. Your photo appears on the left (watch out for the general photos provided by Hello in the first instance). On the right is a Welcome to Bloggerbot message. Below this is an area to add your caption. Type in any caption text you wish.
6. Before sending, delete any images you don’t want to send. In the case of the first send from hello, you may have picked up two other images, with instructions on them. You can click on them in the slide below the left hand side, and remove if you wish.
   
7. Return to the photo with caption. Click Publish button. The right sidebar ticks over with publishing information, and then the actual blog is opened. A new post has been created for you, with the image in the post, with caption. A litte icon is to the side, indicating Hello was used to post it. You can later simply go to your blogger account, and edit this post with new text etc.
   

Posting Flickr Photos to a Blog

Public photos on Flickr can be posted to a blog. You are actually hotlinking from the blog onto the photograph stored in Flickr, which again saves you server space on your own blog. However, note this. If you have public photos (which you will need if you want the Flickr badge below) - somebody else can be linking to these from their blogs. Make sure that your user name is obvious, to allow yourself credit for these should someone do this. Public is public obviously.

Setting Up a Blog for Flickr 

1. First you will need to configure yourself on Flickr with a blog profile.  After signing into Flickr, go to this link to configure your own blog.
   
2. The next page allows you to choose the blog type - from blogger accounts, typepad, livejournal, wordpress to a manila blog and another type that is normally helpful if you don’t have any of those listed - the Meta Weblog type. Choose the most relevant and press Next.
3. The next page asks for some posting details. According to the blog type chosen, you should be able to get a post page detail to insert here. (This may involve searching through the FAQs for your blog service - most services provide a post URL which accepts posts like these) You should supply your blog name also, but can decide not to save (you do need to insert it initially) a password here if you don’t wish to.
4. The next page confirms if you’ve got through so far. It should give you a list of blogs found at the details you’ve given Flickr. For mine, I run several different blogs, so I chose the Scrap Rants one to post to.
   
5. The next screen confirms the details. It’s here that you can remove the checkmark so that your password onto the blog is not stored. I would recommend this. Click done, when finished.
   
6. The next page allows you to create a custom template for the posts to the blog. These are editable at a later date, but it would help to setup sizes for your blog, to ensure the photos (and text) are posted as you wish on your blog. You can choose from a range of centred, left or right - large or small photos layouts.
7. Once you’ve chosen the main template layout, you can then customise provided you understand a bit of html / style sheets.
8. The final screen shows your blog setup details, with a test post button. Try this out. (if you happen to be signed into your blog already - try the refresh button on the browser first). If all went well, you will have a brand new post simply titled, "Flickr" with the following text in it (feel free to delete it)-
   

Posting Those Photos

Now that you’re all setup with a blog on your Flickr account, posting is easy. You will notice that all public photos on their individual pages now have a Blog This button at the top. Clicking on this gives you a list of blogs to select from. Yes, with a Flickr account, you can setup to post to multiple blogs (or those of your friends, provided you have all the logon details etc).

Select the blog you want to post the photo to, and you will probably need to input your password to the blog at this point. Then enter the title for the post, and the post text. Then publish.

Once on the blog itself, the viewer can click on the image thumbnail, and the actual photo will open up in Flickr.
 

Slideshows on Your Blog

For both of the below, when uploading and creating accounts on these webservices, be aware of copyright and usage of your images. Read up on this - Slideshow has a way of you telling them of usage of your images elsewhere, but it you’re uploading to a web-based slideshow, anyone can then view your slideshow and images on the site. Flickr has different Creative Commons licenses available for images stored at Flickr, but the default setting is to make them for public usage. People should still ask you if they are using your image elsewhere however, and seek your permission - even if public. You will need public photos to create the Flickr badges with.

1.Slideshow

The new slideshow tool, a free service, is all the rage now with scrappers. You can upload your scrapbook layouts to the slideshow server from your hard-drive, and format it to show this slideshow on your blog. Many blogs have a long horizontal slideshow as their header, with the layouts sliding along the tool. Others have a smaller version of Slideshow in their sidebar.

Go to Slide.com to download a little application Slide Player which will make uploading the photos easier for you. It is also useful to create slideshows for your desktop, to show people when they visit, and screensavers.Slide can also be used by Mac users. This is not the tool you want for your blogsite however - the front page of Slide is not very helpful in explaining this at the moment.

1. Click on the Make a Slideshow link (for MySpace)
2. Don’t worry about inputting a Myspace URL on the next page - just browse and upload your layouts, and use the slide transition tools to the right to create a slideshow you like.
   
3. Once you’ve got your slide show click on the big "I’m Done" green button.
   
4. The next page will give you an area to input your email address and password. This is your signon data. Remember it, as you will need it to logon to edit next time.
   
5. Now you will be presented with a tab set of pages for Myspace, HI5 etc. Avoid these.
   
6. What you’re looking for is the MySlide link at the top of the page. This will take you to a My Slideshows page. You can choose a nickname now, rather than the numbered anonymous slide number you now have. Click on Choose a Nickname and enter one. Now go back to MySlide. You now have the slideshow with a proper URL. In my case, it’s http://scrapability.slide.com/ You can send people directly to this URL, or copy the code now available to yourself.
   
7. Copy this html code from the page.
   
8. In your blog, insert this code in html - go into the html editor to do this. For Blogger, you might want to put this into your sidebar.
   
9. Note: You can play with the size once you’ve got it onto your site. The smallest size on slide.com is a width of 350 pixels by a height of 262 pixels. My own sidebar is half this width, so I simply overtyped the html set into my sidebar  and halved it to 165 x 131 pixels. You can see the minature result in my sidebar here, at the bottom under Slideshow galleries.

Some other examples of some Slides on blogs -

• Bex in the UK has a small horizontal slide at the top of her blog (in the header area), showing lots of layouts.
  
• Here’s a normal sized horizontal slide on the Spicy, Savvy & Sane blog, which has been put into a sidebar. It’s cut off, but the slide effect still works.
  

2. Flickr Badges

This is an older tool, but still quite easy to use. You will need to create a Flickr account and upload some photographs or layouts there. Note: - ONLY public photos can be used on the Flickr badges. Make sure you put a creative common license or copyright against them at least.

1. If you haven’t already, register for a free account at Flickr from the main page. Or sign in, if already registered.
2. Upload your Photos. Because I’ve had problems before with someone taking a flickr layout of mine and using it on his blog, I choose to make mine Private as I upload them.
   
3. Once uploaded, on My Photos page you should see these. You can organise tags, descriptions etc as wanted.
   
4. Use the Organizer to put your photos into a Set (album). Perhaps you want one album of layouts just for your blog badge.
5. Once back to Your / My Photos, look down the right hand menu and find the Share Your Photos. Click on the Flickr Badge link.
6. Follow the pages through - you can have an HTML badge or a dynamic Flash badge. Choose the option, then the photos on the next page - you can choose some or all of your public photos, or a Set (if you’ve created a set just for the badge, as I had done).
   
7. On the final page is the code. Copy this in full, and insert into the sidebar of your blog.
   
8. Flickr Badges are made for blog sidebars, so should be the correct size. Check mine out in the Slideshow galleries again to see what a flash one looks like.