A large number of eBirders are now adding photos to their checklists, and this has made interacting with eBird much more fun. It is also a tremendous help to our tireless review team, who can use the photos to assess records rare birds reported. Please keep including photos in your checklists! However, one of the primary sites used by eBirders, Flickr (www.flickr.com) has yet again changed the process for photo embedding. This story provides a quick review in how to embed photos using the newest version of Flickr. Note that over the next year, eBird will be working on improving how photos are added to checklists to make it easier, more versatile, and less reliant on third-party websites that regularly change their code.
With Flickr’s recent revisions in April/May 2014, the process for embedding photos has changed again. There are two main things to be careful of. Once you set both of these correctly, Flickr should save your preference so you will not have to reset them for future photo embedding.
We have revised our help story on embedding photos, videos, and recordings. If you are a Flickr user, please review that section to make sure you understand these new changes.
Below are two recent pitfalls to watch out for.
BE CAREFUL OF THE DIMENSIONS
With Flickr’s recent changes, a number of users have photos that end up being almost too small to see. This makes it harder for our reviewers to work with the record and much less fun to scroll through your checklists and see the photos. The default size is 75 x 75 pixels, the photos end up looking like this:
If you set the dimensions correctly (we recommend 500-700 pixels), then the photo will be larger and look much better in your eBird checklists. Our help story (link above) describes how to set the dimensions correctly.
Here’s the checklist, if you want to see the full set of embedded images from this park in Eilat, Israel, in April 2014.
USE HTML, NOT EMBED
The default option when you try to embed photos from Flickr is “embed”. This option allows you to scroll through your website photos. It is preferable to use the “HTML” option, which will make that specific image appear without scrolling options.
Again, please review our help story on embedding photos, videos, and recordings to make sure you understand how to set this.
Please continue to embed your photos! And try checking out the media explorer on the eBird Range Maps.