Save Monthly Bandwidth By Using Flickr
A lot of blogs out there like to post photos, but what some people might not know is that when you upload photos via WordPress to your blog you are going to be storing your photos on your web server. This just means every time that a visitor looks at a page with photos you are using your bandwidth to serve those photos to them.
Bandwidth, What’s That?
Bandwidth is your monthly allotment of transfer space. The more information you dish out the more bandwidth your site uses. Majority of the time bandwidth limits will be set to the GB (Gigabytes) and you can use them up pretty quick if your current hosting package doesn’t offer a high amount of monthly traffic.
Each time someone views a page that is added to your monthly transfer. If your page is 42kb in size, but 4 of the photos you have in your blog post are 500kb each that can quickly add up when you get multiple visitors.
Flickr To The Rescue
I’ve recently looked more into the photo sharing site Flickr. Yes Flikr has been around for a long time but I find that it can be a very useful tool when you want to conserve your bandwidth. Instead of hosting your photos on your website you can have Flickr host them for you! Flickr already offers all the tools you need to share your photos with everyone you just need to drop the hyperlink into your blog.
How Does Flickr Save My Bandwidth?
Instead of the photo sitting on your web server they will be sitting on Flickr. Each time you create a blog post you can add images via a URL that points to a particular photo on your Flickr account, in fact you can also have it point to other people’s Flickr photos if they are licensed for public use. How this might save you bandwidth you ask? Well instead of your visitor’s browser pulling the photo off your site (remember your photo might be like 500kb in size or larger) it will go to Flickr’s website and use their bandwidth to retrieve and display the image on you blog instead. Not only will this save bandwidth, this also saves your storage space as well. So really using Flickr helps you lower your sites operating costs, especially if you’re prone to going over your monthly bandwidth limits.
Flickr and WordPress
There are a bunch of WordPress plugins for Flickr, unfortunately I haven’t found one that I like to suit my needs but I am sure I’ll find one eventually. Adding photos with WordPress the basic way without a plugin is fairly easy to do.
- Upload your photo to Flickr, adding tags, descriptions as needed.
- View the photo you wish to have on your blog and click on the ‘all size’ link at the top and choose the size you wish to have displayed (I normally take the 500 pixel wide version).
- Scroll down to where you can ‘Grab the photo’s URL’ and copy that to your clipboard
- In your WordPress editor select he Add Image button and paste the URL into the appropriate box.
- Click Insert and you’re done! That photo is now being served from Flickr and will save you storage space and bandwidth!
I’m currently working on getting Gallery2 setup for my website, but any pictures that I want to have in a post will probably be uploaded to Flickr first. Photos I put on Flickr will end up being ones that I really don’t care what people do with, whereas photos I upload to my gallery are ones that I’d like to be a little more restrictive when it comes to licensing.
You know that you can set the licensing on Flickr right?
Tyler, this is an awesome post! I am glad you mentioned it. Miss604 did a video of how to insert photos on Blip.tv, and your written instructions are a very nice complement.
Glad you have found it useful. Miss604 uses a nice wordpress plugin that allows her to dragn n drop photos from flickr into her posts but I lost which plugin and I haven’t received a reply from her yet. lol
Great post. It’s also worthwhile pointing out to people that if they do post pics to their blogs, they should optimise them. I know it sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed at the number of people who post pics of over 1MB to their blogs direct.
I still find people are using HTML to resize their photos. They upload the original photo and use the width and height HTML tags. Well your browser still loads the entire photo (which is bandwidth intensive depending on the size) and then resizes it after it’s downloaded.
So yes people need to optimize their photos. You can still offer a full sized one but link to it, don’t display it! lol
Thanks for the comment Danny!