What are Flickr Sets?

Before I discuss more about uploading and sharing photos on Flickr, there are two things that each Flickr user should know. These are sets and tags. I’m explaining sets in this post, and will teach you more about tags in another post.

Sets are a way to group your photos so that they are easy to organize and identify. Figure 1 shows a few sets in my Flickr account.

Figure 1: A few of my Flickr sets

Think of sets as folders in your computer–you might have a different folder for your business correspondence, another for your spreadsheets, and yet another for presentations. Even then, sets are a little different than folders–let me explain this in a different way:

Why sets are like folders?

• Because you name them like folders to identify what’s inside the set.
• Because they make it easy for you to find something at a later date–a set named Singapore Vaction August 2005 is so self explanatory that there’s no way you don’t know which photos you placed in that set!

Why sets are not like folders?

• Because unlike folders, sets don’t contain the photo itself–just a link to the actual file you uploaded to Flickr.
• Also, one photo can be placed in more than one set without being uploaded more than once–since Flickr sets are basically only shortcuts (aliases) to the actual uploaded photo.

Viewing Your Sets

To view your sets, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you are signed into Flickr.
2. In the top navigation bar on the Flickr site (see Figure 2), click the You menu, and choose the Your Sets option.
   Figure 2: Finding Your Sets in the Flickr menu
3. This will open a page that contains thumbnails of all your sets–Figure 1 above showed some sets on my page (Psst! Scooby Gooseberry has no sets yet, but we’ll teach him soon).
4. Here’s what you can do now:- The number of photos in a particular set are mentioned below the set thumbnail.

   – To edit the sequence of photos in the set, or to add more uploaded photos to an existing set, click the Edit button to open the Flickr Organizer interface.

   – Just double-click any set thumbnail to view the photos in that set.

In later posts, I’ll explain how you can organize and view photos on Flickr.

See Also: Flickr Tutorial Series

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