How to Use Flickr to Host Photos for Your Craigslist Ads

I love Craigslist. In most markets, it’s free to list your unwanted stuff for sale, and the site gets so much traffic, most things sell pretty fast. The downside is that Craigslist only allows 4 photos per ad, and they are small and poor quality. And that's too bad, because quality photos help buyers see what they're getting.

Enter Flickr.

With Flickr, you can host high-quality versions of your images and display them in your Craigslist ads for free. Just follow these steps:

1. Upload your product photo(s) to Flickr (sign up for a free account here).
   

   Note: If you don’t want your product photos to show up in your Flickr photostream, mark them private. They’ll still show up on Craigslist when you follow these instructions.

2. In a new browser tab (CTRL+T on most browsers), create your ad on Craigslist and enter the description for the stuff you want to sell.
3. From the Flickr tab, open the product photo and select the Grab the HTML/BBCode option from the Share dropdown menu.
   

   

4. Choose the image size you want (I usually select an image size of 640 pixels on the long edge) and click the HTML selection bubble.
5. Select the Flickr-generated code and hit CTRL+C on your keyboard to copy the code.
6. From the Craigslist tab, place your cursor inside your description where you want your product photo to be, and press CTRL+V to paste the Flickr code into your Craigslist ad.
7. Repeat steps 3-6 for each photo you want to insert into your Craigslist ad.
8. The last step before saving your ad is to upload one of your photos directly to Craigslist. That way, your photo will appear next to your listing as well.
9. Save your Craigslist ad and verify that it appears as expected. If the Flickr images you used were marked private, you can log out of Flickr to confirm that they still appear properly in your ad.

Happy selling!

One-click Keyboard Shortcuts for Flickr

Did you know that you can see a context-sensitive list of keyboard shortcuts from any Flickr page by simply pressing the slash / question mark key ('/' or '?') on your keyboard? Flickr added a lot of great keyboard shortcuts a while back, but I just noticed the shortcut dialog today.

Trying to Get Explored

Since becoming active on Flickr, I've become more and more interested in getting one of my photos "Explored" (in other words, ranked among the top 500 most "interesting" recent photos on Flickr on a given day). This effort has kept me challenged for many months, despite zero success.

Here's the closest I've gotten so far, I think:

This photo was viewed about a dozen times, favorited by two people, and commented on two or three times within a few hours of uploading. That was enough to make it shoot up to number four in popularity among my own photos, and it certainly got more attention than anything else I've uploaded recently.

So what makes one Flickr photo more interesting than another? I'm not really sure (obviously?), but I've gotten some ideas by reading up on it. The general consensus seems to be that new photos are given an "interestingness" ranking based on the number of views and comments, and especially the number of times others have marked it as a favorite. Apparently, the faster these views, comments, and favorites are accumulated, the more interesting Flickr finds the photo and the more likely it is to appear on the Explore page.

Some folks say that it helps if the photo is linked to a location on the Flickr map, as well. However, it seems that adding lots of tags to photos or adding photos to a large number of groups may actually counteract the positive affects of views, comments, and other factors.

So how does one get a photo noticed without adding it to lots of groups or adding a crazy number of tags? As with many things in life, I think it pays to know people. The more people you know on Flickr, the more likely it is that they'll watch for your new photos and view, comment, and favorite them. And how does one get to know people on Flickr? Easy, silly. View, comment, and favorite their photos, and upload your best photos to Flickr.

At least I think that's the way it works.